Monday, November 14, 2022

Trump Just Bit Us In The A** Again.

He is haunting us with his judicial appointments and goes to show you that judicial appointments are more important that having the presidency.

U.S. judge rejects Biden administration's LGBT health protections
Reuters
By Nate Raymond
November 11, 2022


A federal judge in Texas ruled on Friday that President Joe Biden's administration had wrongly interpreted an Obamacare provision as barring health care providers from discriminating against gay and transgender people.

U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk in Amarillo ruled that a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2020 holding that a law barring workplace discrimination protects gay and transgender employees did not apply to the healthcare law.

The ruling by Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former Republican President Donald Trump, came in a class action lawsuit by two doctors represented by the America First Legal Foundation, set up by former Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller.

[…]

Kacsmaryk said Congress, when adopting the law, known as Obamacare, in 2010, during the tenure of former Democratic President Barack Obama, could have included "sexual orientation" or "gender identity" in the text, but "chose not to do so."

Now then, a little history.

When the law was passed in 2010 Health and Human Services back then included both us and lesbians and gays. It was Trump who changed the policy to drop LGBTQ healthcare for us in opposition to a Supreme Court ruling in the cases of; G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. EEOC, Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, and Altitude Express v. Zarda, where the court ruled that “sex” also includes LGBTQ people.

But this Trump judge will not a little thing like a Supreme Court ruling get in his way.

Kacsmaryk said the logic of the Supreme Court's 6-3 conclusion that Title VII's bar against sex discrimination covered gay and transgender workers did not lead to the same result under Title IX's text.

"Title IX's ordinary public meaning remains intact until changed by Congress, or perhaps the Supreme Court," Kacsmaryk wrote.

When I was just now searching web for more on this I found this about the judge on the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights website in an amicus curiae brief during the judge’s nomination hearing.

Nominees to the federal courts must be committed to respecting the law, Constitution, and core American values of justice, fairness, and inclusivity.  Mr. Kacsmaryk does not meet this standard.  He is an anti-LGBT activist and culture warrior who does not respect the equal dignity of all people.  His record reveals a hostility to LGBT equality and to women’s health, and he would not be able to rule fairly and impartially in cases involving those issues.

LGBT Animus:  Mr. Kacsmaryk fundamentally disapproves of LGBT people.  In a 2015 op-ed, he wrote: “In this century, sexual revolutionaries are litigating and legislating to remove the fourth and final pillar of marriage law: sexual difference and complementarity….  The major and growing Abrahamic religious denominations – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish – share a binary view of the human person and human sexuality….  [T]he Catechism holds that ‘homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered,’ ‘contrary to the natural law,’ and ‘do not proceed from a genuine affective and sexual complementarity.’”

Marriage Equality:  Mr. Kacsmaryk has expressed strong opposition to the Supreme Court’s opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, which established a constitutional right to marriage equality in America.  He filed an amicus brief in the Obergefell case in which he argued against marriage equality, and after he lost, he wrote disparagingly: “On June 26, five justices of the Supreme Court found an unwritten ‘fundamental right’ to same-sex marriage hiding in the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment – a secret knowledge so cleverly concealed in the nineteenth-century amendment that it took almost 150 years to find.”  Mr. Kacsmaryk expressed support for Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who violated a federal court order by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples after Obergefell.  Mr. Kacsmaryk said Ms. Davis should not have been forced to go to jail, and he compared her actions to “pacifistic Quakers” who refused to hold combat positions in the military.  Such disrespect for federal court orders is something rarely seen in a federal judicial nominee and for good reason, given that the position to which he is nominated would require adherence to federal court precedent and procedures.

LGBT Equality Legislation: Mr. Kacsmaryk has vigorously opposed bipartisan federal legislation that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  He wrote that the “deceptively titled Equality Act . . . seeks to weaponize Obergefell, moving with lightning speed from a contentious five-to-four victory on same-sex marriage to a nationwide rule that ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ are privileged classes that give no quarter to Americans who continue to believe and seek to exercise their millennia-old religious belief that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman.”  He also wrote: “Like some voracious legal Pac-Man, the Obergefell-fueled Equality Act devours any preexisting constitutional rights that might impede absolute victory in the march for ‘marriage equality.’”

In addition, Mr. Kacsmaryk expressed support for Mississippi’s draconian anti-LGBT law that has been called “the worst in the nation.”[6]  The law allows businesses and government officials with religious objections to refuse to serve LGBT couples and individuals.  When the Mississippi law was struck down by a federal judge, Mr. Kacsmaryk stated: “If his logic holds, it calls into question the entire category of conscience protections for religious dissenters, and that’s just not the American tradition.  That just cannot be right.  We have this robust tradition of accommodating religious dissent.”[7]  The Fifth Circuit overturned the district judge’s decision on standing grounds.

Anti-Transgender Bias: Mr. Kacsmaryk has a particular animus and insensitivity toward transgender people.  In 2015, he wrote: “The Daily Beast recently reported that Facebook offers 51 gender-identity options: agender, cisgender, genderqueer, pangender, transgender, etc., making it seem as though the human person is more like a pluripotent cell whose sex and sexuality are subject to autonomous self-definition….  The view of ‘male’ and ‘female’ cannot easily coexist with a malleable view that recognizes and affirms 51 gender identities – with more to come.”

In the C.P. v. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois court case the federal judge ruled in our favor and in 2015 another court ruled in our favor in the case of Rumble v. Fairview Health Services.

This judge was picked because of his biases by Trump just for rulings like this.

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