Editor’s note: Dr. Rachel Levine was born a man but “identifies” as a woman.
CV NEWS FEED // The Senate confirmed controversial Biden pick Dr. Rachel Levine in a 52-48 vote Wednesday, making him the nation’s Assistant Secretary of Health and America’s first transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a sub-cabinet post.
The confirmation comes amid grave controversy, with Levine embroiled in an ongoing scandal involving his conduct as Secretary of Health in Pennsylvania.
Under Levine’s tenure, thousands of elderly people died in Pennsylvania nursing homes and other care facilities.
The mismanagement, which some have likened to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s, was so egregious that senior-care deaths ultimately came to account for more than half of COVID-19 deaths in the state.
In addition to the current scandal, Levine has also caused alarm among social conservatives and child-advocates more broadly with his radically progressive opinions about child sexuality.
As CatholicVote reported during Levine’s hearings, he refused to back down on his past support for administering puberty-blocking drugs to children identified as “transgender” by medical professionals.
After assuming his new role in the Department of Health and Human Services, Levine will likely represent a markedly more progressive direction for America’s health policy. He will have many critics, including among the nation’s Catholics.
Pope Francis has warned against and criticized what he calls “gender ideology,” which he argues “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family:”
This ideology leads to educational programmes and legislative enactments that promote a personal identity and emotional intimacy radically separated from the biological difference between male and female.
NOTE: The story has been corrected to state that Levine was the first openly transgender person confirmed by the Senate to a sub-cabinet position.