Trump picks pro-life conservative to lead HHS civil rights office
by Peter LaBarbera, LifeSite:
President Trump has appointed social conservative Roger Severino to head the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in a choice celebrated by pro-family advocates and condemned by pro-LGBTQ leftists.
Severino, a Harvard Law School graduate who served as director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society at the conservative Heritage Foundation, has written and published extensively against leftist “gender ideology” and the Obama administration’s promotion of transgenderism in the military.
His new boss at HHS is Tom Price, a conservative, pro-life former congressman from Georgia whose appointment, like Severino’s, has enraged pro-LGTBQ activists as well as the pro-abortion lobby.
Conservatives overjoyed
Social conservatives were overjoyed at the appointment of Severino, who previously worked as CEO and legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, one of the world’s premier legal organizations defending religious freedom.
“It’s a super appointment. Roger Severino is a very balanced thinker who is also an experienced litigator,” Ken Blackwell, formerly a senior domestic policy adviser on the Trump transition team, told LifeSiteNews. Blackwell, a former Ohio Secretary of State, served as undersecretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development under President George W. Bush.
Currently Family Research Council’s senior fellow for human rights and constitutional governance, Blackwell said Severino is “associated with some of the best thinkers in the area of civil rights policy,” citing his experience with Becket, on whose Board Blackwell formerly served.
He said HHS Secretary Price is “building a team” and “has a game plan” to “attack the administrative state,” which includes dismantling the far-reaching tentacles of Obama’s pro-LGBT agenda across the federal government’s bureaucracy.
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