Federal Judge Places Injunction On Obama Transgender And Abortion Rules

Barack Obama ends 2016 by losing yet another court case

(Buzzfeed) A federal judge in Texas on Saturday issued a nationwide injunction halting enforcement of Obama administration protections for transgender and abortion-related healthcare services just one day before they were due to go into effect.

The lawsuit — brought by Texas, a handful of other states, and some religiously affiliated nonprofit medical groups — challenges a regulation implementing the sex nondiscrimination requirement found in the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

The Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation “forbids discriminating on the basis of ‘gender identity’ and ‘termination of pregnancy’” under Obamacare, as US District Court Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his opinion halting enforcement of those provisions in the rule.

Explaining the lawsuit, O’Connor wrote, “Plaintiffs claim the Rule’s interpretation of sex discrimination pressures doctors to deliver healthcare in a manner that violates their religious freedom and thwarts their independent medical judgment and will require burdensome changes to their health insurance plans on January 1, 2017.”

Judge O’Connor also included something else not mentioned in the Buzzfeed article

(Fox News) O’Connor wrote in a 46-page ruling that the rules “likely violate” the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and “places substantial pressure on Plaintiffs to perform and cover transition and abortion procedures.”

In other words, the Obamacare rules would essentially force compliance for doctors and medical facilities to do things they do not want to do, and, let’s face it, Leftists intentionally attempt to go to places and force compliance. That’s how we end up with religious bakers and florists and others being fined and losing their businesses because they don’t do gay weddings. They could have gone to another business, but, no, they want to force compliance.

(Washington Post) The regulation in question implements Section 1557 of the ACA, which prohibits health-care entities that receive federal funding from discriminating on the basis of sex. According to the regulation, this prohibition extends to discrimination based upon “gender identity,” “sex stereotyping” and “termination of pregnancy.” Among other things, it requires that covered entities treat individuals in accordance with their self-proclaimed gender identity, which is defined as a person’s “internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”

In other words, it required that medical facilities ignore basic biology based on the fantasies of deluded people and activists.

Crossed at Right Wing News.