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Health and Human Service Department Won’t Enforce Nondiscrimination Laws
The Department of Health and Human Services will change the rules to allow recipients of federal grants for healthcare, including faith-based adoption agencies and foster care providers, to turn away same-sex couples. This is an attack on the LGBTQ community.
The Trump administration announced today [11/1/19] that it would abandon civil rights rules for organizations receiving billions in taxpayer dollars.... immediately removes any requirement that recipients of grants from HHS enforce nondiscrimination rules that prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.... will allow anti-transgender discrimination in HIV and STI prevention programs, opioid programs, youth homelessness services, health professional training, substance use recovery programs, and many other life-saving services addressing crises with a disparate impact on transgender people in the US.
HHS has already separately moved to allow discrimination in Medicare and Medicaid programs through the elimination of an Obama-era rule protecting transgender people from discrimination in health care.
The rule announced today will also remove rules prohibiting discrimination on the basis of religion.
That last part is key. It will allow religious groups to discriminate against LGBTQ parents seeking to adopt children as one example.
.... those groups would be allowed to discriminate based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or religious affiliation.
The new rule “would permit discrimination against LGBTQ people, religious minorities, and women in programs related to foster care, adoption, HIV and STI prevention, youth homelessness, refugee resettlement, elder care programs and more,” said Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
Mara Keisling, the Executive Director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, responded as follow: “This rule is an abuse of taxpayer dollars in the name of empowering hatred and bigotry towards society’s most vulnerable members. Stigma and prejudice are fueling a public health crisis among transgender people across the country, one that manifests itself as suicide, addiction, intimate partner violence, and HIV. Enabling providers of life-saving services to worsen these crises by rejecting transgender people is a moral crime and a severe abdication of HHS’s mission to preserve public health.”
Sources:
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2019/11/01/hhs-issues-proposed-rule-to-align-grants-regulation.html