The Trump administration continues to stack the federal government with radical right wing extremists.
ProPublica reports that Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation will head the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Health and Human Services.
In addition to opposing the rights of transgender people, Severino oppose marriage equality and public funding of Planned Parenthood.
“The Trump administration has quietly appointed a Heritage Foundation staffer who has railed against civil rights protections for transgender patients as director of the federal agency charged with protecting the civil rights of all patients.
“Though the administration did not issue a formal announcement, Roger Severino is now listed on the website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as director of the Office for Civil Rights. His prior position was as director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the Heritage Foundation, where he focused on “religious liberty, marriage and life issues.” (The DeVos Center is named for the in-laws of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.)
“The civil rights office is in charge of enforcing patient privacy protections and ensuring that patients’ civil rights are protected, that they are free from discrimination and that they have access to services such as interpreters.
“Asked for comment, HHS forwarded a link to Severino’s title and biography. In a statement, Heritage spokeswoman Marguerite Bowling said, “Roger Severino has a distinguished record of fighting for the civil rights and freedoms of all Americans. We have no doubt that Roger in his new role at HHS will protect the civil rights of all Americans.”
“Severino’s position does not require Senate confirmation.
“Based on his prior writings, Severino will likely take the agency in a different direction than it had under the Obama administration. Last year, the agency issued rules banning discrimination against transgender patients, carrying out provisions of the Affordable Care Act. (A federal judge put those rules on hold on Dec. 31, siding with a Catholic hospital system, other religious health providers and five states that challenged them. The Trump administration has not sought to overturn the injunction.)
“When those rules were proposed, Severino and a Heritage colleague wrote a scathing critique, saying they jeopardized the religious liberty and freedom of conscience of health care providers.
“By prohibiting differential treatment on the basis of ‘gender identity’ in health services, these regulations propose to penalize medical professionals and health care organizations that, as a matter of faith, moral conviction, or professional medical judgment, believe that maleness and femaleness are biological realities to be respected and affirmed, not altered or treated as diseases,” Severino wrote with colleague Ryan Anderson.
“In a column for the conservative website Daily Signal, Severino and Anderson wrote that the HHS rule would force doctors to perform sex reassignment surgeries. “They would effectively require controversial procedures, such as ‘sex-reassignment’ surgery, that respected medical professionals argue have not been proven effective in treating serious mental health conditions.”
“Despite the column’s assertions, federal rules cannot force doctors to perform procedures for which they are not trained or competent. Moreover, professional societies support coverage for gender transition treatments….
“A coalition of progressive groups criticized Severino’s appointment.
“I could not think of a more dangerous person to head up the Office of Civil Rights at HHS,” JoDee Winterhof, senior vice president of policy and political affairs of the Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “Once again, Donald Trump is declaring war against our community by appointing anti-LGBTQ people at all levels of his administration.”
“The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights also expressed its dismay. “This appointment, made without fanfare, is part of disturbing trend by the Trump administration of naming people who disagree or outright oppose the mission or role of an agency or office to leadership positions within those entities,” the group said in a statement.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
We are drowning in appointees who are pulling the religious liberty card and the freedom of conscience card to demean people who are not keen on government-funded religious programs of any kind.
I am not surprised that Trump and friends think that the great civil rights issue of our time is all about gender identity, especially the rights of guys to impose their will on women and to treat members of the LGBT community as mental ill.
“The DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society.”
Really?
I know what a think tank is, so I must assume that The DeVos Center is an ignore tank.
Of course he does. Bizarro world will get even more bizarre.
As I have said before, we have had a far right wing/libertarian/Ayn Randian coup d’etat. The good news is that it has been bloodless, the bad news is that it will set the country back by many years (decades?). It is inevitable that Trump will get to appoint 2 or 3 far right wing justices to the SCOTUS who could be there for another 30 years. One of the big reasons I went crazy begging people to vote for Hillary (after Bernie lost). Hopefully more Democrats will be elected to Congress in 2018 and then we can hear what terrible people we are for voting for the lesser evil and all that stupid garbage. I will happily and gladly vote for the lesser evil until some kind of political/legislative miracle happens and unicorns are prancing down Main Street.
One word: SICK & TREASONOUS! Impeach that Dump.
Actually TWO words…I got carried away by this COUP.
The coup already took place. What we need now is a restoration of constitutional government.
I wonder how many swing voters and those who are basically Democrats but chose Trump in the last election realized they were voting to place our country in the hands of big business and far right religious zealots in the Tea Party, who are eager to send our nation back to Trump’s notion of when our country was great, which is when we were effectively ruled by white, male, Christian, multi-millionaire, industrialists who were unregulated and allowed to exploit anyone with less power than what they could by for themselves.
Maybe Trump voters didn’t suspect, like many of us progressives did, that Trump would turn out to be a wimp with no real policies of his own who would just do what his ultra-conservative Republican handlers tell him?
The right wing media mislead the public on Obamacare so that Repubs figured all they’d have to do is repeal this horrible pox on the public and all would be fine. Didn’t work that way. Trump and the hardliners didn’t win this round.
…………….
How Right-Wing Media Saved Obamacare…The Atlantic
Years of misleading coverage left viewers so misinformed that many were shocked when confronted with the actual costs of repeal.
…The point isn’t that Obamacare was without flaws, or that no one was pointing them out, but that many of the most-watched conservative entertainers were spreading wild falsehoods rather than cogently explaining the bill’s real costs and shortcomings. There were defensible reasons to oppose the law, but many who told pollsters they were against Obamacare had indefensible reasons, in that they were grounded in the wild falsehoods. What’s more, on a cable-news network that bills itself as “fair and balanced,” viewers were seldom given any information about Obamacare’s benefits or exposed to any stories of folks who were helped by it….
Read More:
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/the-right-wing-media-helped-obamacare-in-spite-of-itself/520851/?utm_source=eb
Seems the GOP hitched their wagon to the wrong horse. Sadly they are trying to drag us all over the cliff with them.
An Associated Press analysis shows that North Carolina’s “bathroom bill,” the law that limits anti-discrimination protections for LGBT people, will cost the state $3.76 billion over 12 years.
I’m still waiting for the dominoes to start falling, and I’m not talking about the federal agencies these Alt-Right extremists are leading. I’m talking about the extremists.
Whose Streets? (Then and Now)
By Jon Else, TomDispatch
27 March 17
…Vestiges of the very ethos against which the civil rights movement fought have grown ever stronger and found a welcome place in his White House, their strength buoyed by a growing societal disapproval of media elites. In the process, Trump has inoculated himself against appeals for justice as has no president in our lifetime.
When it comes to any rights appeals in the immediate future, no one with real federal power is likely to be listening. There will be no sympathy for human rights petitioners from majority Republicans in the House of Representatives untroubled by reelection fears in their ferociously gerrymandered districts, nor from the soon-to-be-devastated civil rights division of the Department of Justice. What mechanisms will remain for the activists to activate?
In a country becoming less white every day, Democrats recently stood helpless when it came to blocking the confirmation of the whitest cabinet in decades. Soon enough, the Supreme Court will have a conservative majority and then President Trump will have the run of the table, racking up a political monoculture unknown in our time….
Does reform still demand powerful allies, and if so, who might they be? A few centrist Republicans, courageous career attorneys in the Justice Department, billionaire Silicon Valley CEOs committed to pluralism, a mass of determined young people running for office?
As organizers have discovered more than once since the early days of the republic, new levers lie waiting somewhere deep in the grand clockwork of our democracy. The only question is: Where?
Tomgram: Jon Else, Eyes on the Prize 2017
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog//176258/
The only comfort I take from Trump admin’s appt to cabinet et al exec posts of folks whose records show they’d like to dismantle the very depts they’ve been appointed to head: (a)human nature. Folks given power are highly unlikely to order elimination of their source of power. (b)inability of negativists to lead. We just saw how this works in the ACA-repeal/replace fiasco. And that was foreshadowed during 6 of Obama’s 8 yrs. If all you’ve got for ideas on bringing back prosperity is, make govt smaller/ untrammel the free market, you have an 1895 viewpoint & have been a naysayer your entire career. Once given power, your policies will simply make the middle/ lower class’s life worse– & the party that put you in place will be voted out.
This comes from Progressive Breakfast:
Dave Johnson
Trump Nominates ‘Alligator’ Clayton To Run SEC
… Trump has brought so many swamp creatures into his administration that it has become a cliché to say that Trump is filling the swamp with alligators. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), appears to be one more alligator … Clayton was, literally, the “Goldman Sachs bailout lawyer.” He represented Goldman and other Wall Street firms during the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis … Clayton is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm that is, according to FN Financial News, “more closely associated with Wall Street than perhaps any other law firm.” … With so many Wall Street ties, ”Clayton will be the most financially conflicted SEC chairman in history.”