President Biden took office amid a pandemic, and so you might have expected him to name an expert in public health to run the Department of Health and Human Services.

Instead he nominated a partisan attorney, Xavier Becerra, formerly a congressman and California’s Attorney General.

Why would the president do that?

Because Biden sees HHS not primarily as a health care agency but as a culture-war agency, and Becerra is a ruthless culture warrior.

In California, Becerra abused his power and brought felony charges against a pro-life activist for exposing Planned Parenthood’s trade in the internal organs of aborted babies. He also tried to force pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to advertise abortion.

In Congress, Becerra sponsored a bill that would have forced Catholic employers to provide birth control to employees.

Becerra also joined an effort to discriminate against Catholic hospitals that wouldn’t perform or recommend abortions.

Becerra’s latest crusade against conscience involves sex changes—what the Biden administration calls “gender-affirming care.”

In May, HHS issued its final rules mandating that hospitals give sex-change hormones and remove or alter the genitals and breasts of patients who ask for it.

Catholic hospitals, of course, consider such operations akin to mutilation. A woman does not become a man by believing she is a man. And so removing her natural organs because of some notion of gender identity is not morally acceptable.

When a Republican congresswoman asked Becerra how his rule would affect Catholic hospitals, he tried to dodge the question. Finally he admitted that he wants to cut off federal funding to any hospitals that won’t remove the genitals of men or pump testosterone into women.

Of course, Congress has spent the past few decades ballooning federal healthcare spending such that hospitals are now dependent on HHS dollars.

This is nothing other than an effort to shut down all religious institutions that don’t abandon their values and adopt the novel and extreme sexual morality of Xavier Becerra.

It’s religious persecution—which is exactly what Joe Biden hired him for