If a person could overdose on schadenfreude, I’d be stretched out on my office floor in rigor mortis right now.

With zero fanfare, the Trump administration installed Roger Severino as director of HHS’s Office of Civil Rights. This is from his official page at HHS:

Roger Severino is the Director of the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  Prior to joining the Department, Mr. Severino served as Director of the DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society in the Institute for Family, Community, and Opportunity at The Heritage Foundation.

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Mr. Severino was previously chief operations officer and legal counsel for the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

While at Heritage, Severino was a prolific writer and that is what is causing splody-heads. He is a defender of religious liberty. He believes there are only two sexes. Both of which make him anathema to “public health” professionals who generally believe religion is fine as long as you don’t practice it and that any sexual perversion should be honored. Of particular concern is the effort by HHS to impose upon the US healthcare system the same view of this “transgender” nonsense that Department of Education tried to impose upon our education system. While Education was primarily interested in getting men into women’s restrooms and locker rooms, HHS has focused on bullying all doctors and hospitals into treating transgender individuals as sane and requiring those institutions to do whatever surgical mutilation is necessary to help them live out their delusions. One such case is in the courts right now that would force a Catholic hospital to perform “gender reassignment surgery.”

Transgender fanatics are terrified that Severino will pull the plug on this fraud:

Much to the consternation of LGBT rights supporters, the Trump administration has appointed to head the civil rights division of the Department of Health & Human Services a former staffer with the anti-LGBT Heritage Foundation who wrote extensively against the civil rights of transgender people.

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“Frankly, it is sick that President Trump would appoint Roger Severino to lead OCR – putting a man who made his career opposing healthcare non-discrimination laws in charge of enforcing those very same protections,” Stachelberg said. “Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance companies routinely denied equal treatment to same-sex couples and more than half of private insurance plans explicitly discriminated against transgender patients, with more than a quarter of transgender people reported being denied medical care by a provider. Severino’s writing makes it clear that he wants to take us back to the days when 1 in 4 transgender people was refused medical care outright.”

Among the posts Severino wrote for The Daily Signal, the blog for the Heritage Foundation, were in opposition to LGBT people, especially transgender rights. After the White House came out against a provision in a congressional defense spending package that would have allowed anti-LGBT discrimination among federal contractors, Severino wrote a post called “Obama Threatens to Veto Military Bill Because It Protects Religious Groups.” After the Pentagon lifted its ban on openly transgender service, Severino wrote a post called “Pentagon’s Transgender Policy Defies Common Sense.”

Severino also defended North Carolina’s anti-LGBT House Bill 2, which prohibits transgender people from using the restroom in schools and government buildings consistent with their gender identity. Decrying the “unrelenting and coordinated attacks” against the state for enacting the law, Severino criticized former U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch for filing a federal lawsuit against the measure, which he said amounted to progressives “using government power to coerce everyone, including children, into pledging allegiance to a radical new gender ideology.”

This is a situation where conservatives, regardless of their feelings about Trump, should be cheering. I can’t imagine a President Rubio making an in-your-face appointment like this. I can barely imagine a President Cruz making it. But these sub-cabinet appointments are critical to stopping the progressive agenda before it becomes embedded in the law. But, unfortunately, hate for Trump takes priority over everything else. Because to admit Severino is an excellent choice requires one to admit that Tom Price is an excellent choice. And that requires one to admit that Donald Trump is not a one-dimensional buffoon surrounded by Russian agents, which is something a lot of self-described conservatives cannot do without destroying their own worldview.