Trump’s Former Chief of HHS’ Workplace of Civil Rights Explains His Lawsuit Towards the Biden Administration| Nationwide Catholic Register

Roger Severino, the outgoing director of the U.S. Department of Health’s Civil Rights Office, stepped down from his high-profile position last month after establishing a new division to protect the rights of conscience and freedom of religion.

Severino, a Catholic attorney for life, has been OCR’s senior director for the past three decades and made headlines when his office picked up cases like one involving a Vermont hospital that allegedly forced a nurse against hers Belief in participating in an abortion.

Severino also clashed with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra over issues such as the Trump administration’s withdrawal of President Barack Obama’s mandate on the gender transition and the state’s alleged violation of the Weldon Amendment, a federal law protecting the conscientious rights of health care providers, together .

While the pandemic sparked heated debate over the proposed rationing of hospital beds, ventilators and protective equipment in a few quarters of the past year, Severino’s office responded to complaints about the discriminatory treatment of the elderly and disabled.

More recently, in the final days of the Trump administration, Severino was appointed to the Council of the United States Administrative Conference (ACUS). ACUS examines and advises on various administrative processes to improve efficiency, and the council is separate from any executive power.

On February 3, Severino filed a lawsuit against the White House in Biden for wrongly resigning from the council before the end of his three-year term, and then dismissed him when he refused.

Joan Frawley Desmond, Senior Editor at Register, spoke to Severino on February 4 about the guiding principles and highlights of his tenure at OCR and his plans to make gains on conscience rights and the protection of religious freedom while President Joe Biden resets the goals for that office .

Your lawsuit, filed this week, alleges that the President of the White House personnel office of Biden asked you to resign by February 3rd. If you refuse, you will be fired. Why did you take legal action?

I want to hold President Biden accountable. The law governing my appointment says it was valid for three years and was duly signed by the President when I took the oath of office. I am well qualified for the position.

I want to make sure the rules are clear and applied fairly. President Trump has not dismissed Obama holdover in this legal counsel. But President Biden tried to erase those duly appointed. This shows the fact that President Biden’s rhetoric about unity is inconsistent with his actions. It seems petty and vengeful to try to remove qualified people who care about good governance.

Under your leadership at HHS, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has established a Conscience and Religious Freedom Unit (CRFD) to enforce laws that protect conscience and religious practice and prohibit coercion and religious discrimination in health care. Why did you push for it?

The main inspiration was to see the trend in American culture reflecting growing attacks on people of conscience, from the Obama administration’s attack on the little sisters of the poor to threats to remove them from service to the elderly poor punish for not offering contraception reporting to other sisters. This gross abuse of religious freedom signaled to me that something was terribly wrong with the way the federal government handled these issues.

So I set up a Department of Conscience and Religious Freedom to institutionalize this protection, just as we have institutionalized protection for any other civil right. That was the vision and I am so proud to make that vision a reality.

Why was there so much opposition to this initiative within HHS?

There was resistance at all levels. Any change in the status quo means disrupting interests and longstanding habits. Unfortunately, federal government employees simply did not respect the law and had to be informed and held accountable. and that was missing. So far there has been no body there that campaigned for religious minorities within the government.

Part of it is a secular mindset that had taken root in government, a notion that anything related to religion had to be excluded because it was religion. But that [mindset]This of course leads to discrimination.

After you opened the new division, Planned Parenthood claimed that the HHS Civil Rights Bureau, under your leadership, had changed its mission from providing equal access to federal health programs to protect religious freedom.

What is your answer?

We were a full spectrum civil rights bureau.

For example, during the pandemic, we formed an incredible coalition of people who stand up for life, the rights of people with disabilities, and civil rights. We have opposed a utilitarian ethic that threatened to throw people with disabilities overboard in the midst of the COVID crisis, particularly when it comes to testing life-saving care. We resisted, and I’m very proud of that.

In a key enforcement action, your office found that the state of California is violating the Weldon Amendment by illegally mandating all health plans regulated by the California Department of Managed Health Care to cover abortion without exclusion or restriction. What happened in this case?

In January 2020 we sent a notice of violations that the [state of California] that they violated the law. You can’t force people to buy abortion insurance. They cannot receive federal funding and do not expect any consequences for violations [federal law].

They received their notification of non-approval in January 2021 and are not expected to claim reimbursements of $ 200 million per fiscal quarter under Medicaid until they have resolved the violation.

I didn’t see any evidence that they tried to comply. Due to the timing of the disbursement in the first quarter, the federal money would not be approved. If the Biden government gets the law up and running, it has an obligation to hold California accountable. The law is crystal clear. California cannot receive federal funding and continues to discriminate against people who refuse to pay for abortions.

As your office intensified investigations and enforcement of the protection of conscience, critics accused you of blurring the lines between church and state and even redefining freedom of religion to “impose a single belief on all Americans.” What is your answer?

I have always come back to basic constitutional principles and the law. There’s a reason our first freedom is freedom of movement. This does not simply mean that you have the freedom to worship in a mosque, temple, or within the four walls of a church.

We have the basic right to ask questions about God, draw conclusions, and freely live by it.

We have the right to live our faith without government discrimination or undue burden [imposed by the state]. But if we do not enforce these principles, religious freedom will disappear in a generation, to the detriment of religious believers and non-believers alike.

Would you discuss OCR’s efforts to ensure the protection of conscience for healthcare workers and institutions who, because of religious or professional objections, do not participate in sex reassignment surgery and other treatments for patients who identify as transgender?

My goal is always to get the law passed by Congress through. … Now we see a subsequent redefinition [of sexual discrimination] This is not supported either by the text of the legislative congress passed or by the actual understanding of the words “male” and “female” today.

During your tenure at OCR, the Supreme Court considered this issue in its 2020 Boston v Clayton County ruling. It was found that Title VII – the federal law prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sex in employment – is applicable to sexual orientation and gender identity. That ruling has helped split federal district court rulings that either support Obama’s gender switch mandate requiring doctors to undergo transgender surgeries if such referral has been made, even if they object on religious or medical grounds, or withdrawal of the Office maintain this mandate.

In 2020 justice [Neil] Gorsuch surprised the world with his majority decision in Bostock, and now we are trying to clarify the full ramifications of that decision. [The split rulings] created a lot of confusion that hopefully the Supreme Court can resolve. Biological realities in healthcare make a huge difference in science and medical treatment.

Gorsuch made it clear that important interests of religious freedom are at play and that data protection interests must be taken up at a later point in time. That later date is now essentially up to us.

What are your concerns when the Biden administration starts operating?

I started a new initiative at the Ethics and Public Policy Center called the HHS Accountability Project to make sure the Biden administration doesn’t undo many things that I and others have built to protect religious freedom and civil rights from the proper understanding of human beings Person and the law.

The Biden administration nominated Xavier Becerra, who was my main antagonist when I was head of the Civil Rights Bureau, for trying to force nuns to pay for abortion coverage for other nuns in his state, and I said it was illegal. So his main qualification as the head of HHS is to violate the laws protecting conscience in healthcare. quite a strange choice.

That will be my main focus: protecting the legacy of our defenses of religious freedom, human life and science, free from ideology when it comes to health care.

I also want to ensure that the protection of the rights of people with disabilities that I have put in place is not only protected but expanded. This is an issue on which both the right and the left should find common ground.