Last week the Trump administration rolled back two controversial Obama administration policies. One of the policies related to protections for transgender people under civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination based upon gender. The other involved a requirement that employers provide insurance coverage for contraception services – the Obamacare “contraception mandate” – which clashed with the rights of employers opposed, based on religious conviction, to contraception.

Both developments suggest that Mr. Trump’s goal of moving the country away from the “progressive” agenda of the Obama years is well underway.

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Three years ago, then-Attorney General Eric Holder directed the Justice Department to deem the federal statutory prohibitions against employment discrimination based on “sex” – Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – as including a “transgender” person, that is, someone who self-identifies as a member of the opposite sex and who may or may not have undergone sex reassignment surgery. In effect, individuals could choose their gender and have that choice legally enforced.

While many serious people at the time questioned why anyone should really care about the meaning of this or that word in the context of anti-discrimination laws, most others recognized that the issue was a far-reaching one. Indeed, it will be recalled that the controversy over the use of bathrooms and group showering facilities soon followed Mr. Holder’s action.

Still others argued that anti-discrimination laws are typically the product of laborious legislative processes with much congressional discussion and general agreement about what the decided-upon words refer to. It could hardly be argued that the lawmakers of the time had “transgenderism” even remotely in mind when they acted to outlaw sex discrimination. So Mr. Holder’s inclusion of transgenderism in the “sex” category was plainly a usurpation of the legislative process – and was opposed by many on that ground alone.

And of course there were those who objected simply because it furthered the philosophy that “anything goes.” Surely we can think of nothing more definitive than the gender one is born into, something no amount of adjusting beyond the artificial and cosmetic can change. Not that we are unmindful of those who have been unable to accept their birth gender, but these special cases cannot be allowed to render meaningless the natural order.

In any event, Attorney General Jeff  Sessions last week issued a memo to Department of Justice officials and lawyers annulling the Holder policy and declaring that the word “sex” in the federal civil rights law means “biologically male or female” and accordingly the law does not include “discrimination based upon gender identity per se, including transgender status.”

As a Justice Department spokesman summed up: “The Department of Justice cannot expand the law beyond what Congress has provided. Unfortunately, the last administration abandoned that fundamental principle….”

The Trump administration also softened the Obamacare contraception mandate. The Justice Department issued a general guidance to federal agencies and prosecutors that it was now official policy that workers, employers, and organizations – not just religious organizations like churches and synagogues – may claim broad exemptions from anti-discrimination laws on the basis of their religious beliefs. This will impact on the types of enforcement cases the Justice Department will bring or support although it will not bind courts or civil rights groups.

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued new rules directly scaling back the Obamacare requirements that employers include birth control coverage, at no cost to their employees, in their health insurance plans and broadened exemptions available to employers objecting to providing coverage for contraception if it conflicts with their sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions.

It will be recalled that several years ago the Little Sisters of the Poor, a group of  Catholic nuns who care for the indigent elderly, was pursued by the Obama Justice Department for refusing to provide contraception insurance coverage to its workers. The case went all the way up to the Supreme Court but the court did not issue a definitive ruling.

The new rules are designed to make it easier for people to follow the tenets of their faith in sync with the protections of the First Amendment for the free exercise of religion. But there undoubtedly will be many challenges to the new rules in the courts by the ACLU and like-minded groups.

From where we sit, however, the notion that religious beliefs must be trampled upon in order to provide something that is otherwise easily available is just palpably wrongheaded policy.

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