Texas launches lawsuit against Obamacare discrimination protections for LGBT people
Texas has joined with other Republican states to challenge an Affordable Care Act provision that ensures doctors can’t refuse to treat patients because they’re gay.
The AFA, commonly known as Obamacare, includes safeguards which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability in certain health programs or activities.
It ensures that health insurers and healthcare providers in receipt of federal funds cannot reject LGBT people, enshrining specific protections for trans healthcare for the first time.
But the state of Texas has formed an unholy alliance with an extreme anti-LGBT evangelical group, the ‘Becket Fund for Religious Liberty’ , in order to challenge the provision.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched the lawsuit – also joined by Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska and Wisconsin – making the outrageous claim that the law “requires taxpayers to fund, and doctors to perform, procedures designed to change one’s sex”.
Back in reality, gender reassignment surgeries are highly specialised procedures that require a doctor to opt to undergo years of training and study. it is a deliberate,
It is a deliberate, brazen lie to suggest that any unwitting religious doctor might be “forced” to perform them.
However, Paxton claimed the law violates “the medical judgment and conscience rights of doctors and health care professionals across the country”.
Paxton continued: “It forces health care workers, including physicians, to provide controversial services.
“Under the new rule, a physician that believes that certain treatments are not in a patient’s best medical interests may be in violation of federal law. And a physician that, for religious or conscientious reasons cannot perform a particular procedure, chooses to instead refer a patient to another health care provider may also be determined to be in violation of this new rule.”
Other parts of his statement reveal that bigotry is his main motivator, however, as he insists that transgender people do not exist.
He said: “This new rule interprets ‘sex’ as a state of mind, not a biological fact. When it enacted the law, Congress used the term ‘sex’ as a biological category.
“The Obama Administration is now trying to redefine the law so that the term ‘sex’ means ones’ ‘internal sense of gender which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female’.”
Jay Brown of the Human Rights Campaign said: “Ken Paxton’s continued attacks on transgender Americans are politically motivated, designed to intimidate and simply beyond the pale.
“After months of demonising and targeting transgender students, it seems he has decided that all transgender people must be the target of his machination.
“We strongly oppose Paxton’s harmful lawsuit, and the courts should see it for what it is – a shameful, cheap political attack.”
Paxton has fought all progress tooth-and-nail.
A federal judge recently blocked an Obama administration directive that called on schools to safeguard transgender students, amid a lawsuit from the state of Texas.
