[NATIONALREVIEW] Yesterday, the Caliphornia, an impregnable bastion of the Democratic Party, Court of Appeals issued a truly remarkable opinion in a truly remarkable case. It held that a Catholic hospital could indeed face legal liability for failing to perform a hysterectomy as part of a female-to-male "transition" ‐ even though its policy broadly bans sterilization surgery generally (not just for trans individuals) and even though the hospital referred the patient to a non-Catholic facility in the same network. The patient obtained the hysterectomy a mere three days after the original scheduled surgery date and sued anyway.The facts of the case are simple. The plaintiff, Evan Minton, initially scheduled a hysterectomy for August 30, 2016, at Mercy San Juan Medical Center (part of the Dignity Health hospital network) as a treatment for gender dysphoria. Mercy is a Catholic hospital, and the day before the scheduled surgery, Mercy canceled the procedure. It cited the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ "Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services." As the court noted, "The Directives prohibit direct sterilization and require that bodily and functional integrity be protected and preserved."
In other words, a Catholic hospital was upholding basic Catholic religious doctrine.
Mercy’s president then recommended that Minton’s doctor obtain emergency admitting privileges at nearby Methodist Hospital, which is also a Dignity Health facility. The doctor obtained privileges and performed the surgery on September 2, 2016. Minton then sued Dignity Health, claiming that he was the victim of gender identity discrimination.
The trial court dismissed his complaint, but yesterday the California Court of Appeals revived his claims. It held that Dignity Health could protect the religious liberty of its Catholic institutions only if "it can provide all persons with full and equal medical care at comparable facilities not subject to the same religious restrictions."