Public Advocate Shoulder to Shoulder with President Trump To Defend Religious Liberty
Eugene Delgaudio, president of Public Advocate says
"Time and again, President Donald Trump has answered the call sounded by Public Advocate to defend assaults on religious liberty. We have detailed that in many posts here but it now seems weekly and regularly and this latest court battle in the Second Circuit and the Ninth Circuit involves the assault by the Obama Administration on religious health care doctors and workers. President Trump has corrected the Obama Administration abuse of Christians and other people of strong faith in the medical field.
Public Advocate is preparing an amicus brief to defend one of President Trump's most important initiatives to defend the religious liberties of Christians.
There are over a dozen federal laws that prohibit discrimination against Christian doctors and nurses and other health care workers who have religious objections to participating in certain medical procedures - mainly abortion, contraception, sterilization, and euthanasia. These days, you can add transgender surgery to that list.
However, those statutory prohibitions on state power have not always been enforced by the federal government. And leftist states do not want those statutes enforced -- obviously.
In the closing days of the Bush Administration in 2008, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a final rule consolidating some of the various "medical conscience" laws into a central location, setting up a way for HHS to enforce them.
Three years later, the Obama Administration gutted that rule so these laws would not be enforced.
In 2019, the Trump HHS reversed Obama's HHS, not just restoring -- but expanding -- the Bush-era final rule protecting freedom of conscience. This results in real protections of Christian medical workers in a time that the states are demanding everyone follow an immoral code of conduct.
The Trump HHS rule was quickly challenged by liberal states (New York, California, etc.) and organizations (Planned Parenthood). Also to no one's surprise, liberal federal judges in New York and California issued injunctions against the rule, prohibiting the terms from going into effect.
Now, there are two appeals pending in the Second Circuit and the Ninth Circuit, and we anticipate that this important issue will ultimately end up before the Supreme Court. Public Advocate will ask the Court to allow us to file an amicus brief in each of these two Circuit Court cases which would be very similar."