CNSNews.com found its two great hatreds of late — transgender people and President Biden’s cabinet nominees — merging into a single story. A Jan. 19 article by Melanie Arter introduced it, making sure to find an unflattering screenshot to illustrate it:
President-elect Joe Biden nominated Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine to be assistant secretary of the Department Health and Human Services on Tuesday.
If approved, Levine would become the first openly transgender Senate-confirmed federal official, The Hill reports.
“Dr. Rachel Levine will bring the steady leadership and essential expertise we need to get people through this pandemic — no matter their zip code, race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability — and meet the public health needs of our country in this critical moment and beyond,” Biden said in a statement.
Slightly over three hours later, Arter attacked Levine:
Transgender Pennsylvania Health Secretary Rachel Levine, who was tapped by President-elect Joe Biden on Tuesday to be assistant HHS secretary, faced scrutiny last year for moving her own mother out of a nursing home after ordering all nursing homes and long-term care facilities to accept COVID patients from hospitals.
The Daily Caller reported in May 2020 that Levine admitted she pulled her mother out 11 days after issuing the order on March 29. Levine’s admission came after a local TV station discovered what the secretary had done.
In fact, Levine’s mother was not in a nursing home but, rather, in a personal care facility that is regulated separately and under Levine’s jurisdiction as state HHS director.
Arter also repeated criticism of Levine from a Republican state senator who claimed that moving COVID patients from hospitals to long-term-care facilities caused coronavirus to spread there, killing patients. But Arter censored the state government’s response, that doing so freed up beds in hospitals for more COVID patients and that the virus’ spread in long-term-care facilities is more likely due to asymptomatic employees.
CNS editor Terry Jeffrey went transphobic on Levine in his Jan. 20 column:
When Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf named Levine his state’s “physician general” in 2015, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story explaining the doctor’s background.
“She has been a leading voice in efforts to treat teens with medical and psychological problems,” the paper quoted the governor as saying.
She went to Harvard as an undergraduate and then to medical school at Tulane, and eventually worked at the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and Health System.
“Along the way, she was married and fathered two children,” said the Inquirer.
That’s right: The Inquirer reported that “she … fathered two children.”
Someone else, apparently, mothered them.
“Now divorced,” the paper explained, “Levine said she began the transition to becoming a woman about 10 years ago.”
The internet played an important role in this “transition.”
[…]This week, both The Washington Post and The New York Times featured Levine’s transgenderism in their online headlines about her nomination. “Biden Selects Transgender Doctor Rachel Levine as Assistant Health Secretary,” said the Post. “Biden Chooses Rachel Levine, a Transgender Doctor, for Senior Health and Human Services Role,” said the Times.
But does the science say that a male can become a female when he changes his name and his manner of presenting himself?
The same day, Craig Bannister complained that “This week Biden nominated transgender Dr. Rachel Levine — the former Dr. Richard Levine — as an assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.”
In his Jan. 29 column, dishonest Catholic Bill Donohue claimed that a Catholic media outlet’s Twitter account was suspended after it described Levine as “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman,” insisting that this was “innocuous speech” and ranting, “the free speech rights of all Catholic media outlets and websites are in jeopardy. Twitter is a menace to freedom. It needs to be reined in by the Congress.”
Tony Perkins referenced the incident in his Feb. 2 column, adding, “It’s incredible how far we’ve come since November. Now, Big Tech can’t even co-exist with the facts!”