FRC warns Levine confirmation spells trouble for religious liberty and the unborn

News provided by

Mar 24, 2021, 20:42 ET

WASHINGTON, March 24, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Senate today confirmed Rachel Levine as Assistant Secretary of Health by a vote of 52-48. Family Research Council warned Levine will use his new position to target and punish parents and people of faith for their beliefs on gender and abortion. While serving as Pennsylvania's secretary of health, Levine, a biological man identifying as a woman, has advocated sex changes for children and adolescents and failed to competently manage Pennsylvania's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Travis Weber, FRC's Vice President for Policy and Government Affairs, said:

"Levine may be the most extreme radical ever confirmed by the Senate. During his confirmation hearing, he refused to answer when Senator Rand Paul asked him directly whether transgender hormones or surgery for minors met the international definition of abuse. Like embattled New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, Levine also forced Covid-19 patients out of hospitals and into nursing homes, and defended the action in the face of criticism even as his own mother was quietly removed from a nursing home. And he has pushed a variety of pro-abortion and anti-religious freedom proposals.

"Levine is distinguished by his extremist views and his penchant to punish those who don't share them. He has openly admitted that children as young as five or six should choose whether to be a boy or a girl, despite their parents' wishes. He has described religious freedom protections to the Affordable Care Act's contraception mandate as 'immoral and unethical.' Levine will exercise his authority to punish parents and people of faith who object to his anti-life, anti-family agenda.

"Levine's crusade against religious liberty would only be made worse by bills like the Equality Act or Fairness for All, both of which HHS would have a hand in implementing. Yet under the Biden administration, HHS is being led by radical political appointees like Levine and Xavier Becerra," concluded Weber.

Mary Szoch, Director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, added:

"With Levine at the helm of HHS, Planned Parenthood will look to expand its tentacles further into the expansion of abortion and harmful gender ideology. Levine has already indicated multiple ways in which he would make tens of millions more dollars available to the abortion giant, which recently branched into targeting children for transgender experiments.

"Planned Parenthood is already the second-largest dispenser of puberty-blocking hormones, which can have lifelong health consequences, including interference with brain development, inhibition of normal bone-density, and sterilization. This leader of the culture of death displays an unsettling indifference to the truth that cross-sex hormones can leave a person incapable of having children—a callousness completely in line with the words of its racist, eugenicist founder, Margaret Sanger, 'But for my view, I believe that there should be no more babies.'"

For more information on Rachel Levine's views, visit: www.frc.org/levine.

-30-

SOURCE Family Research Council