The dictates within the Affordable Care Act did not make religious exceptions, which became a battleground especially in the areas of abortion and “gender affirmation” surgeries. Many lawsuits were fought on behalf of religious liberty to protect healthcare providers at the time. Unfortunately, the ACA has reared its ugly head again in an attempt to get around the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, this time with the aid of Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The DOJ claims the Affordable Care Act can be used to force healthcare workers to provide gender-affirming surgeries based on the 2020 Supreme Court ruling Bostock v. Clayton County that expanded civil rights to include “gender identity.” If the door is cracked open for gender identity, then abortions can also be forced through.

Luke Goodrich, an attorney for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, has been fighting this fight since Barack Obama first tried it in 2016. He says the current attempt to overrule religious liberty is an abuse of power: “They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. … They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit.’”

HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra is part of the “they” that Goodrich has been battling in court. Becerra has always been radical on the culture war issues, even when he was attorney general of California. After all, he and current Vice President Kamala Harris went after the undercover journalists who exposed a Planned Parenthood for dealing fetal body parts.

As HHS secretary, Becerra’s power to impose upon religious freedom has only expanded. His insistence on the supposed injustice of allowing religious freedom to healthcare providers was made clear in a statement to the press: “to make sure that whoever you are, whatever you look like, wherever you live, however you wish to live your life, that you have access to the care that you need so that your decisions are based on what you and your health-care provider and your physician or the person you depend on for medical decisions is available to you so you can access the care that you need.”

So-called gender identity is a volatile battleground in the culture wars. This is just the latest volley. It’s interesting to note that while the U.S. federal government is ramping up its pressure on religious institutions, the United Kingdom is changing course.

The UK — which is about 10 years ahead of the U.S. in its “gender affirmation” experiment — is closing its only youth gender clinic after seeing the devastating results firsthand. The healthcare workers at the clinic were feeling pressured into fast-tracking children into the use of puberty blockers and so-called gender-affirming surgeries instead of doing their due diligence and addressing the real underlying mental health struggles.

These UK clinic workers also saw firsthand the effect of the transgender social contagion. Their number of patients rose rapidly from 250 annually to 5,000. Keep in mind that the UK has a population of just over 63 million, and just over six million are children eligible for the clinic. The social contagion was much more obvious because of the smaller population size over the course of the decade.

Instead of using the experiences and lessons learned from the United Kingdom, the Biden administration is pushing even harder to deny religious liberty and spur on an ideology that is destroying lives.

If Becerra wins his lawsuit, he can use the Affordable Care Act to begin exacting heavy fines against religious doctors, nurses, mental healthcare providers, and others in the medical field who refuse to bow to his dictates on abortion and gender affirmation. Let’s hope he fails yet again, and this time more permanently.