(The Center Square) – Housing men with women in Catholic nursing homes as directed by a New York rule is being challenged by a group of nuns who on Thursday were joined by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The Justice Department said it is intervening in a legal challenge filed by an order of Catholic nuns, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, against New York. The complaint challenges state law that requires housing men who identify as female with women in the sisters’ residential hospice care program.
Federal authorities said they support the Sisters of Hawthorne’s argument that the New York law violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection of religious groups.
“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “New York’s law would force these religious women to choose between their faith and their license if they wish to continue serving the dying.”
He said the Justice Department’s decision to intervene in the lawsuit is a warning to New York and other states “that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology.”
The nuns operate a 42-bed nursing home – Rosary Hill – that provides palliative care for the dying poor. They sued the state in April over a 2024 law, the LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, requiring long-term care facilities to use preferred pronouns and assign rooms based on gender identity. The sisters said the law infringes on their religious beliefs.
“Requiring a person to identify another by a sex other than his or her God-gifted sex would therefore require such a person to act against central, unchangeable and architectural teachings of the Catholic faith,” the complaint reads. “It would contradict the teachings of the Bible concerning God’s creative sovereignty, contradict reason and truth, and betray our sacred obligation not to knowingly harm other persons, particularly the most vulnerable.”
The Catholic Benefits Association, a group that advocates for Catholic employers’ rights to provide a workplace and benefits in line with their religious beliefs, is supporting the nuns in the legal challenge.
The lawsuit says the nuns requested an exemption from the state policy from the state Department of Health, but didn’t receive a response.
Without an exemption, the complaint said, the nuns “face imminent fines and license revocation if they continue their current religious practices.” They said the sisters “have not complied and do not intend to comply” with the state’s requirements.
