Tipsheet

Catholic Nuns Are Once Again Force to Fight the Government

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  April 08, 2026 8:00 AM

As recently as December, the Little Sisters of the Poor were still filing appeals against the government, this time in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as part of a decade-long fight against the states' anti-Catholic, unconstitutional push to force them to provide abortion and birth control coverage in their health plans. This started under the Obama administration, when Obama tried to force religious organizations to cover birth control and abortion as part of their employee benefits. Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor were the two highest-profile groups that fought back against it. 

Despite winning in court, including the Supreme Court, several times, blue states keep trying to undermine their First Amendment rights.

And now another order of Catholic nuns, this time the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, are gearing up for what will likely be a long battle with another blue state that seeks to crush their religious freedom, too. The Sisters care for the terminally ill and New York's transgender rights law means they'd have to let men who pretend they're women access women's rooms and bathrooms, as well as use their preferred pronouns.

Here's more:

An order of Catholic nuns who care for the terminally ill poor has sued to block a New York transgender-rights law that requires nursing homes to use pronouns, assign rooms and allow restroom access based on a patient’s gender identity, or risk jail time.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a 125-year-old nonprofit institution that runs the Rosary Hill Home, on Tuesday filed a lawsuit accusing the state of violating the religious group’s constitutional rights with the LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights.

“We Sisters have taken care of patients from all walks of life, ideologies, and faiths. We treat each patient with dignity and Christian charity,” Mother Marie Edward, general superior of the Hawthorne Dominicans, said in a statement. “We have never had complaints. We cannot implement New York’s mandate without violating our Catholic faith.”

Catholic Benefits Association, which is assisting the Hawthorne Dominicans, said the law makes an exemption for the Church of Christ, Scientist, but not Catholics or other religions.

There's a reason governments do this, and why they routinely close down Christian shelters, food banks, and meal programs. They want the government to have total control, and then they can use the church's lack of charity (charity the government made illegal, mind you), to say the church serves no real benefit to the community.

It's all by design.

"For admission as a resident, they only require a terminal diagnosis of cancer and your word that there is no one to care for you," wrote Fr. Petri.

And for that, the state is punishing them.

Democrats are pushing for a national "trans bill of rights" that would codify this across the country.

Democrats in blue states are tyrants. These Sisters provide compassionate end-of-life care to poor people, and the state would rather fine and arrest them — driving them out of business and forcing those poor people to suffer and die — than allow them to acknowledge the reality that men cannot become women.