Thursday, January 18, 2018

New Reigious and Conscience Protections are hard to understand...

The Trump administration has issued new guidelines for Religious and Conscience protections.  The LGBTQ  community is pretty upset because they were advertised (to Trump's base) as making it safe for people to discriminate.

I read the ACTUAL documents, and the wide interpretation of Section 2 allows for some consequences that aren't immediately obvious, but are damning.  First - the text from HHS.gov.



The section that allows discrimination against LGBTQ personal is section 2.  It could make it legal for a hospital or any health personnel to:
  1. Deny any invitro support to a homosexual couple.
  2. Deny a married homosexual couple a voice in each other's care (so we are back to needed medical power of attorney).
  3. Deny any medical service to a Transsexual American.
  4. Deny HIV care.
  5. Deny HIV prevention drugs.
  6. Deny child care services to the child of a gay couple (this has already happened in Michigan
  7. Deny emergency care to a homosexual (rare now, but widespread during earlier eras of AIDS)
  8. Deny schedule care to a homosexual
For single women - gay or straight - it allows:
  1. Refusal of contraception.
  2. Deny invitro support to a single woman (gay or straight)
  3. Deny pre-natal care to a single woman (gay or straight)

The actual wording is soft enough to be read as not particularly of interest to LBGTQ. But the speakers today at the HHS unveiling were a who's who of anti-gay activists.

UPDATE: HHS’s announcement Thursday morning featured several speakers who spoke out about concerns related to abortion, but who also have long histories of opposing LGBTQ equality, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who helped kill an LGBTQ rights bill in 2016, Sen. James Lankford (R-OK), who believes it should be legal to fire people for being gay, Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-MO), who led the fight to keep transgender people out of the military, Montse Alvarado, head of the anti-LGBTQ Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, and Everett Piper, who proudly declared that Oklahoma Wesleyan University sought a religious exemption so it could discriminate against transgender people.