Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys representing Christian Healthcare Centers, a Michigan faith-based medical nonprofit, filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, seeking to vindicate the organization’s constitutionally protected right to operate as a religious ministry.
Nessel and other Michigan officials are responsible for enforcing Michigan’s civil rights law, which state courts recently reinterpreted to include sexual orientation and gender identity. This law now requires Christian Healthcare Centers to hire people who do not share their faith, to prescribe cross-sex hormones to facilitate efforts to alter a patient’s biological sex, and to use pronouns that do not accord with a person’s biological sex. All of this violates the ministry’s religious beliefs and undermines its ability to provide safe healthcare to the needy and the rest of the community.
“Christian Healthcare Centers should be free to continue its vibrant outreach to the community through its low-cost, high-quality medical care,” said ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President of Appellate Advocacy John Bursch. “It’s unconstitutional for the state to require that this Christian ministry abandon its faith principles in order to continue serving those in need.”
“Christian Healthcare Centers should not be forced to check its faith at the clinic door—the very faith that motivates the nonprofit to open its doors to help those in need,” said ADF Senior Counsel Hal Frampton. “Christian Healthcare Centers serves everybody with compassionate care and respect, including patients who identify as the opposite of their biological sex, providing them with the same high-quality care it provides to all of its patients. Yet this lawsuit is necessary to protect Christian Healthcare Centers’ constitutional rights and to ensure other religious organizations can freely operate according to the dictates of their faith.”
Christian Healthcare Centers provides high-quality healthcare to all while offering substantially reduced prices for patients with lower incomes who cannot afford quality care elsewhere. The nonprofit was founded to offer a distinctly Christian alternative to traditional primary care, focusing on meeting patients’ medical, emotional, and spiritual needs. Christian Healthcare Centers’ principal place of business and main clinic is in Plainfield Charter Township, and it has a secondary clinic in Newaygo.
ADF attorneys filed the lawsuit Christian Healthcare Centers v. Nessel in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division.
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
There has been an overwhelming push in western societies in recent years to pressure those who hold Biblical values to compromise God’s standard of morality, for societies’ new definition of “right and wrong.”
The keyword here is compromise. Doctors are being asked to compromise reality, science, and the Biblical truth.
Last year, Franklin Graham stated that many Christians are “being threatened with financial ruin for their Biblical convictions.”
“This should never happen in a nation founded by men and women seeking religious freedom from their tormentors!” he underscored. “How grateful we should be for courageous men and women, who refuse to bow to the gods of this age and are willing to pay whatever the cost may be for their steadfastness.”
“The flagrantly immoral course that our nation has taken just in the last decade should concern every single Christian who desires to live by the rights of their Biblically informed conscience,” Graham wrote. “We have degenerated morally at such an accelerated rate that it will take God’s providential hand to stay His judgment on our land.”
Our society has used aggressive efforts to demonize Biblical morals, suppress the truth, and strip away constitutionally protected Religious freedoms.
As author and Stand Up For The Truth radio host David Fiorazo, recently explained: “At the risk of oversimplifying, this worldview war is about power and it all comes down to three words: God or man.”
