A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from removing medical research articles from a government website over its promotion of gender ideology and mentions of transgender people.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January which called for the government to only recognize the two genders, male and female, and “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
To comply with the January order, various articles on the government’s Patient Safety Network were removed and a pair of Harvard Medical School doctors claimed the articles being removed was an infringement on their First Amendment rights.
Judge Leo Sorokin of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts granted a preliminary injunction calling on the Trump administration to restore the two doctors’ articles and others, which were removed for similar reasons.
“The plaintiffs are likely to succeed in proving that the removal of their articles was a textbook example of viewpoint discrimination by the defendants in violation of the First Amendment. Because irreparable harm necessarily flows from such a violation, and the balance of harms and the public interest favor the plaintiffs, the motion for a preliminary injunction is allowed in part,” the ruling said.
“After careful review of the plaintiffs’ argument and the law upon which it relies, the Court also finds that they are entitled to a restoration order concerning the other content removed from PSNet pursuant to the same policy AHRQ used to identify and remove the commentaries by Drs. Schiff and Royce,” Sorokin also said in the ruling.
JUDGE ORDERS TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TO ‘FACILITATE’ RETURN OF MAN DEPORTED TO MEXICO
Friday’s ruling from Sorokin is the latest of several decisions going against the Trump administration in the U.S District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
A pair of orders from judges in that district on Friday blocked Trump’s bid to prevent Harvard University from admitting foreign students and ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of a deported Guatemalan national.