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| Sen Rand Paul made a fool of himself with his bad faith questioning of Dr. Rachel Levine. |
It should surprise no one that the Family Research Council doesn't like any of President Biden's appointees. The group especially dislikes Dr. Rachel Levine, Biden's pick for assistant secretary of health at the Department of Health and Human Services. If Levine is confirmed, she would be the first openly transgender pick confirmed by the United States Senate. Like FRC, other members of the conservative right have been scrambling to derail her nomination. The most egregious attempt came from Sen. Rand Paul during her confirmation hearing. Paul conjured up images of genital mutilation done to children and so-called dangerous drugs when he questioned her. Justifiably, he was widely criticized for trafficking inaccurate information;
However, in its recent Washington Update, FRC attempted to rehash the exchange between Paul and Levine in way which makes Paul look like a hero:
Rachel Levine . . . is the kind of person Joe Biden believes should be second-in-command at HHS. Senator Paul, not caring how the media would savage him, decided to ask some pointed questions about how Levine's transgender agenda would impact the children of this country. Now, a week later, he's been called everything from a "transphobe" to a bigot. "And what's amazing about being labeled as a 'hater,'" he told listeners on "Washington Watch," "is that I never even mentioned Levine or the surgery and things that [he's] done to [himself]. I just asked whether a minor, whether a 10-year-old, could override parental consent [to get access to transgender hormones or surgery]." Levine refused to answer, leaving all of us to wonder just what brave new world Americans would be entering under his direction at HHS."So your parents say, 'You're 10-years-old, and you're not going to do this.' And then the 10-year-old says, 'No, I am.' And then the government would adjudicate that as the minor having the right to overrule their parents. I think that's horrendous to imagine. People also need to realize what's going on in these [gender] clinics. Ten percent of the kids are between the ages of three and 10. And when they go in... what they do is if the child is confused... four or five people will come up to them and say... 'Oh, you're so brave. It's a great decision.' No one's telling them the opposite. The people who work in these clinics are often people who've undergone these surgeries or done these things themselves. It's one opinion that they're hearing, and then their parents would be overruled."It doesn't matter whether you're a Republican or Democrat, Paul said. "I think there's a lot of mainstream people who would be horrified to know that a 10-year-old could be goaded into these decisions. And I think Levine's [position] is so far out of the mainstream that people need to hear about it."
