CV NEWS FEED // The Biden administration moved to shield Rachel Levine from having to take part in an Alabama lawsuit over the state’s ban on so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors.
Rachel (born Richard) Levine, a man who calls himself a woman, has served as Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health since March 2021. Despite having no military experience, Levine was successfully nominated by Biden to the rank of four-star admiral in the Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.
Hannah Grossman of FOX News reported that the DOJ “intervened to protect” Levine “from discovery in Alabama litigation relating to its ban on transgender sex change procedures for minors.” Grossman added: “Discovery is a procedure during litigation in which parties present and request evidence before trial.”
CatholicVote previously reported on the lawsuit, writing that
in April 2022, Governor Kay Ivey (R) signed S.B. 184, banning and criminalizing various types of so-called “gender-affirming” medications and surgeries for people under the age of 19. Violations of the law carried a punishment of up to 10 years in prison, making Alabama the first state to explicitly declare providing puberty blockers or gender reassignment surgery to minors as a felony.
However, just one month later, “a provision of the law that dealt with chemical interventions, such as puberty blockers, was blocked by U.S. District Court Judge Liles Burke,” who “declared that the law “[infringed] on” parents’ “fundamental right to direct the medical care of their children.”
In June, more than a year after he had blocked the law, Burke postponed the trial, which was originally supposed to take place this August to April 2024. The delay gave “more time for the parties to produce requested records,” the Associated Press reported.
The AP also highlighted that “the Alabama law remains on hold under” Burke’s temporary injunction.
Republican Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall is defending the law. Marshall “requested Levine’s records, believing she [sic] is one of the primary voices in the federal government – and relevantly in the Health and Human Services Department – who is advocating for sex changes in children with gender dysphoria,” Grossman reported.
Marshall said, “It is not hyperbole to say that Admiral Levine is the leading public-facing official in the United States government when it comes to transitioning treatments for minors.” He added that Levine “routinely endorses puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones” for children:
So if one were putting together a list of potential custodians at HHS concerning transitioning treatment for minors, Levine would be at the top. Levine obviously has communications and documents relevant to this litigation. Yet when Defendants requested that Levine be made a custodian, the United States refused.
Before his role in the Biden administration, Levine was Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There, he oversaw a policy that directed many COVID patients into nursing homes. The move caused an outbreak among the facilities’ elderly population, who were particularly vulnerable to the virus.
A May 2020 report from Spotlight PA found that at the time, “Deaths in nursing homes and assisted living facilities currently account[ed] for more than 68% of all the coronavirus-related fatalities in the state, with 3,086 long-term care residents.”
A similar policy was implemented in the neighboring state of New York under the administration of now-disgraced then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The policy has been estimated to have led to around 15,000 deaths.
At the same time, Levine helped move his 95-year-old mother out of a personal care facility.
