The Justice Department has formally notified a U.S. District Court of its intent to join a lawsuit filed by a group of Catholic nuns against the State of New York. The legal battle, brought by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, challenges a state healthcare law regarding housing assignments in residential facilities.
The federal government is throwing its weight behind the Sisters’ argument, stating that New York’s mandate violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection of religious groups.
The dispute centers on New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2. This statute requires long-term care facilities to assign rooms and use names and pronouns that align with a resident’s gender identity rather than their biological sex. However, the Dominican Sisters, who run the Rosary Hill Home, say this directly contradicts their faith. The facility provides free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their final days and welcomes all patients.
According to Catholic doctrine, biological sex is God-given and cannot be morally changed, and identifying a person by another sex is considered a religiously prohibited lie. In line with these beliefs, Rosary Hill houses patients in single-sex rooms based on biological sex and uses corresponding pronouns while staff perform close personal care, such as changing nightgowns, combing hair, and painting fingernails.
In its legal filing, the Justice Department alleges that New York’s law violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by holding religious facilities to standards that non-religious facilities can avoid.
The government’s Complaint-in-Intervention points out that New York permits secular facilities to deny opposite-sex room assignments if a clinical judgment determines the setup would cause psychological harm to a roommate. However, the state offers no equivalent accommodation if a religious facility determines an assignment would cause spiritual harm.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division released a statement regarding the government’s decision to step in. “States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” Dhillon said. “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 intervention was officially certified by the Acting Attorney General under 42 U.S.C. § 2000h-2. This federal statute grants the United States the authority to join ongoing equal protection cases that are deemed to be of general public importance.
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