Justice Department Backs Catholic Nuns Against New York's Gender Ideology Law

The Justice Department has notified the U.S. District Court that it intends to intervene in a lawsuit filed by an order of Catholic nuns — the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne — against the State of New York.

The lawsuit challenges a state law that requires housing biological men with women in the Sisters’ residential hospice care program.

The United States supports the Sisters of Hawthorne’s argument that the New York law violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection of religious groups.

“States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days. 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.”

The United States’ Complaint-in-Intervention alleges that New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2 violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by requiring religious facilities to meet requirements that violate religious beliefs, while excusing non-religious facilities from those same requirements.

New York’s law requires long-term care facilities to assign rooms to transgender residents based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex, and facility staff to use names and pronouns reflecting gender identity rather than biological sex.

New York’s law permits facilities to refuse opposite-sex room assignments based on secular clinical judgments — that the assignment would cause psychological harm to a roommate — but offers no equivalent accommodation based on a religious judgment that the assignment would cause spiritual harm.

The Acting Attorney General certified this case pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 2000h-2, which authorizes the United States to intervene in equal protection cases of general public importance.

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate Rosary Hill Home, a skilled nursing facility that provides free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days, and welcomes every patient.

Catholic teaching holds that biological sex is God-given and cannot be morally changed, and that identifying a person as another sex is religiously prohibited lying. Consistent with that teaching, Rosary Hill houses patients in single-sex rooms based on patients’ biological sex, refers to patients by pronouns reflecting their biological sex, and performs “very personal acts of care such as painting women’s fingernails, combing their hair, changing them into fresh nightgowns, and arranging flowers in their rooms.”

The Civil Rights Division’s Disability Rights Section is handling this matter. The Section enforces federal civil rights laws that protect disabled individuals, including those who receive palliative care in long-term care facilities. For more information about the Civil Rights Division and its work, please visit www.justice.gov/crt.

Members of the public who believe they have experienced religious discrimination may file a complaint at civilrights.justice.gov.

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