Biden administration to build miles of new border wall in Texas

Washington D.C., Jul 26, 2017 / 04:29 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Family members of American citizens imprisoned in Iran pleaded with members of Congress on Tuesday to advocate for their safe release.

“Please help me bring my father and brother home. I… […]

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 12, 2020 / 02:00 pm (CNA).- President-elect Joe Biden made several Cabinet appointments this week, offering insight into the possible policy priorities of his administration, and areas of concern for Catholic institutions.  

As CNA reported, Biden already appointed officials to the State Department and Department of Health and Human Services, sensitive departments which could have important repercussions on religious freedom issues both at home and abroad.

Biden’s selection of Obama-era officials Antony Blinken and Linda Thomas-Greenfield as Secretary of State and Ambassador to the United Nations could signal a continuance of that administration’s diplomatic approach to prioritizing LGBT rights while deemphasizing or taking a softer approach to promoting religious freedom.

Biden’s selection of California Attorney General Xavier Becerra as HHS Secretary has also raised serious questions about the possible effect his leadership could have on issues central to Catholic organizations.

Becerra was involved in two Supreme Court cases against pro-life groups and the Little Sisters of the Poor, and aggressively enforced California’s abortion coverage mandate. His office also continued fighting pro-life activist David Daleiden in court for his publishing of undercover conversations with Planned Parenthood officials.

Also this week, Biden tapped Rep. Marcia Fudge to be the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. The agency oversees policy in a number of areas of concern to Catholics, including homeless shelters and fair housing practices.

Rules from that agency have drawn criticism from the U.S. bishops’ conference under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

In 2016, the Obama HUD required shelters partnering with the government to accept clients based on their gender identity and allow them equal access to facilities—through the Equal Access Rule. Under the rule, for instances, biological males identifying as female would have to be housed with women and have access to women’s bathrooms.  

The bishops said that the law “impeded” the ability of Catholic shelters to place clients based on their biological sex, and would threaten the security of women in single-sex housing.

Fudge supported keeping this rule, cosigning a July letter from members of Congress to the Trump administration asking them not to change it. She was also an original cosponsor of the Equality Act, which would make sexual orientation and gender identity protected classes in a number of areas, including housing.

This past summer, the USCCB was critical of the Trump HUD’s changes to federal fair housing rules. The conference said that the rule change—supposedly taken as an attempt to deregulate policy—weakened federal oversight against racial discrimination in housing practices.

Fudge has been hailed by groups like the National Fair Housing Alliance for her previous work to ensure equitable access to affordable housing.

Biden has also announced his pick of Susan Rice to head his Domestic Policy Council. Rice served in foreign policy circles in the Obama administration as Ambassador to the United Nations and then as National Security Advisor to President Obama.

Rice made promoting LGBT rights a priority in her work in the Obama administration, and has said that she is “pro-choice.” Planned Parenthood praised her appointment as UN ambassador, saying she would help bring “equality to women and women’s health around the world.”

In an August interview with NPR, Rice discussed her relationship with her son and areas of agreement and disagreement. “We disagree on things like choice. I’m pro-choice. He’s pro-life. That’s the kind of difference that we ought to be able to respect,” she said.

In 2016, Rice addressed an audience at American University about LGBT rights. Rice said that when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, she and her husband took a photo together outside the White House which was lit in rainbow colors.

“That Friday night of the landmark Supreme Court ruling, my husband I took a photo together that we cherish, outside of the White House lit up in the colors of the rainbow to celebrate what we’ve always known—that love is love is love,” she said.

Biden’s White House chief of staff will be Ron Klain, who previously served as his chief of staff when Biden was vice president.

In a June 11, 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post, Klain warned that the Supreme Court could overrule Roe v. Wade and “impose nationwide restrictions on abortion — even in pro-choice states — in the name of ‘fetal rights.’” During the campaign, Biden pledged to enact sweeping federal protections for unlimited abortion access in a bid to preclude future state limitations being placed on the practice.

Biden also made appointments to critical health care positions during the coronavirus pandemic. He tapped Vivek Murthy to be Surgeon General after he served in the position from Dec., 2014 until the end of Obama’s presidency.

Murthy supported the Obama administration’s contraceptive mandate; at his confirmation hearing in 2014, he was asked by Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) if he believed “contraception coverage should be mandatory regardless of religion.”

Murthy did not confirm or deny that, but answered that “I respect people’s individual beliefs and religious beliefs” and that as surgeon general he would “bring the science, not just to the public, but to legislators as well” to make policy decisions.

On the subject of vaccine mandates, Murthy spoke out in 2015 of the need for parents to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles and expressed concern about the spread of disease in areas where large religious communities refuse vaccinations.

“When you’re in a pocket with low vaccination rates, that’s when you find yourself at greater risk of getting measles,” Murthy said in an interview with CBS News.

Biden has also tapped two other Catholics as cabinet heads—Gen. Lloyd Austin who, if confirmed, would serve as the first Black Defense Secretary, and Denis McDonough, former White House chief of staff under Obama, to serve as Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

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Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 27, 2017 / 04:04 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- You’ve probably heard of Bruce Jenner.

Now referred to as Caitlyn Jenner, the high-profile Olympic athlete with a famously dramatic family had a very high-profile transition from male to female – including mutilple surgical alterations, a cover on Vanity Fair magazine and the now-canceled docu-series “I am Cait.”

You probably haven’t heard of Bruce Reimer.

Bruce and his twin brother Brian were born in Canada in the 1960s. At the age of seven months, the otherwise healthy boys were circumcised. But the doctors used a new method of circumcision, involving an electric cauterizing needle, on Bruce. An accident occurred, completely burning off the little boy’s penis.

Brian’s operation was canceled, but his parents were devastated.

The Reimers decided to take Bruce to Dr. John Money, a psychologist and sexologist at Johns Hopkins they had seen on T.V.

Dr. Money had a theory that aside from reproductive and urinary functions, gender was a social construct. Until the Reimer twins, he had largely worked with intersex cases – children born with ambiguous genitalia or abnormal sex chromosomes.

But the Reimer twins – otherwise healthy and biologically normative – were the perfect experiment on which to test his theory of gender fluidity. Brian would be raised as a boy, and Bruce would from now on be called Brenda, and raised as a girl.

The Reimers agreed, and insisted on girl’s clothes and socialization for Brenda throughout childhood. They never told the twins about the accident, or about Brenda’s biological sex.

The twins were brought in for a yearly observation with Dr. Money, who dubbed the case a wild success by the time the twins were nine years old.

“No-one else knows that she is the child whose case they read of in the news media at the time of the accident,” he wrote.

“Her behavior is so normally that of an active little girl, and so clearly different by contrast from the boyish ways of her twin brother, that it offers nothing to stimulate one’s conjectures.”

What the Doctor didn’t tell

Deacon Dr. Patrick Lappert is two things you wouldn’t necessarily expect to occur in tandem – a plastic surgeon, and a deacon for the Roman Catholic Church.

These two roles give him a unique understanding of the human person, both physically and metaphysically. They’ve also given him a unique perspective on transgendered persons, and the current cultural movement to support surgical sex changes.

Dr. Lappert was asked to speak at this year’s Truth and Love conference for Courage in Phoenix. He included the case of the Reimer twins during his talk, “Transgender Surgery and Christian Anthropology.”

The on-paper success of Brenda Reimer as a lovely and well-adjusted little girl did not match the lived reality of the child, Dr. Lappert said. Brenda Reimer was a rambunctious tomboy – shunned by the boys for wearing dresses, and by the girls for being too wild.

“She was very rebellious. She was very masculine, and I could not persuade her to do anything feminine. Brenda had almost no friends growing up. Everybody ridiculed her, called her cavewoman,” Brenda’s mother, Janet, recalled in an interview with BBC News.

“She was a very lonely, lonely girl.”

During the twins’ yearly checkup and observation, Dr. Money would force the twins to strip naked and engage in sexual play, posing in positions that affirmed their respective genders. On at least one occasion, this sex play was photographed.

By their teenage years, the twins were strongly opposed to going to their checkups with Dr. Money.

By age 13, Brenda was suicidal.

By 15, the Reimers stopped taking the twins to Dr. Money and revealed the truth to Brenda – he was biologically male. He fully embraced his male identity, chose the name David, and began hormone therapy and a surgical genital reconstruction. He dated and married a woman, whose children he adopted.

But the wounds of his traumatic childhood were deep for both David and his brother. Both suffered from depression. After 14 years, David’s wife divorced him. Then Brian died from a drug overdose. Not long after, in May 2004, David committed suicide. He was 38 years old.

Despite everything, Dr. Money never printed any retractions of his studies, or added any corrections.

“He never said a word, never took any of it back,” Dr. Lappert said.

Which is hugely problematic, because this study is still frequently cited as a successful gender transition by the medical community at large, including the society of plastic surgeons to which Dr. Lappert belongs, he said.

“I put this case out there as an example, to show you the foundation – the sand upon which this whole thing is built,” Dr. Lappert said.

“We have to understand this as we’re talking about the human person as a unity of spirit and form, that there is an integrity to the maleness and femaleness with which we are made.”

One of the biggest problems with transgender sex change surgeries is that they are permanent and irreversible in any meaningful way, Dr. Lappert said.

“There’s nothing reversible about genital surgery – it’s a permanent, irreversible mutilation of the human person. And there’s no other word for it,” he said.  

“It results in permanent sterility. It’s a permanent dissolution of the unitive and the procreative functions. And even the unitive aspect of the sexual embrace is radically hindered if not utterly destroyed,” he said, because of the inevitable nerve damage that occurs during the surgery, and because the brain will always register the genital nerves as coming from their organ of origin.

In other words, nerves connected to a vagina will always register with the brain as a vagina, even if they are now part of a surgically constructed penis, and vice versa.

Another major issue is that sex change surgeries seek to solve an interior dysfunction with an external solution.

“Underneath it all, you’re trying to heal an interior wound with exterior surgery,” Dr. Lapper said.

This article was originally published on CNA Jan. 19, 2017.

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