Trump Administration Opens New Division To Promote Religious-Based LGBTQ Discrimination

The Trump administration is taking further steps to make anti-LGBT animus legal by creating a new office within the Department of Health and Human Services - The Conscience and Religious Freedom Division.

While the move is being dressed up as an attempt to shield doctors whose religious beliefs oppose performing abortions, this also opens the door for any service provider to deny LGBTs treatment.

From The New York Times:

Critics said the administration was giving health care providers a license to discriminate, and they raised the possibility that some doctors might deny fertility treatments to lesbian couples and that some pharmacists might refuse to fill prescriptions for certain types of contraceptives. In such situations, patients could suffer, and health care workers could violate professional or ethical obligations.

“Donald Trump’s administration is handing out permission slips for hospitals and providers to deny individuals, including women and LGBT patients, access to a full range of health services including life saving emergency care,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of the Women’s Rights Initiative at American Bridge, a Democratic advocacy group. “If there is any doubt about how morally repulsive, politically unpopular, and far-reaching the consequences of this rule will be, crafting it in secret behind closed doors and without public input says all you need to know.”

LGBT blogger/activist JoeMyGod writes, "The new HHS division provides a complaint page if healthcare providers feel they’ve been forced to betray Jesus by providing care to somebody they hate."

The Trump administration announced a new division that will prioritize religious objections over the health and civil rights of women, transgender people, and others.

Medical standards, not religious belief, should guide medical care.https://t.co/XjQMNj40FR

— ACLU (@ACLU) January 18, 2018

Just released from HHS.

To be clear: this is a license to discriminate — against women’s right to make their own healthcare choices, against transgender Americans, and even against the entire LGBT community. All under the guise of ‘religious freedom.’#HHS pic.twitter.com/xQFB07T0JD

— Greg Hogben (@MyDaughtersArmy) January 18, 2018