Harmeet Dhillon, DOJ intervene after Catholic nuns sue NY over law forcing them to use trans pronouns in hospice care

The Department of Justice has notified a federal court that it intends to intervene in a lawsuit brought by an order of Catholic nuns challenging a New York law that requires long-term care facilities to house transgender-identifying residents based on gender identity rather than biological sex. Accommodations they are required to have under New York law include using preferred pronouns, allowing males into women's bathrooms, and others.  

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate Rosary Hill Home, a skilled nursing facility that provides free palliative care to indigent cancer patients, sued the State of New York over the law, arguing that it violates their religious beliefs and the US Constitution.

The DOJ said New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2 violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by forcing religious facilities to comply with requirements that conflict with their beliefs while allowing secular facilities to refuse opposite-sex room assignments based on clinical concerns. “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 Dhillon of the DOJ’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,” Dhillon added. “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.”

Under the law, long-term care facilities must assign rooms to residents who identify as transgender according to “gender identity” and require staff to use names and pronouns reflecting gender identity rather than biological sex.

The DOJ argued that while New York allows facilities to reject certain room assignments if they would cause psychological harm to a roommate, it does not offer a similar accommodation for religious objections based on spiritual harm.

Rosary Hill Home houses patients in single-sex rooms based on biological sex and uses pronouns consistent with biological sex, in accordance with Catholic teaching. The Sisters also provide intimate end-of-life care for patients, including changing and grooming them and assisting with other personal needs.

The DOJ said the case is one of “general public importance” and is being handled by the Civil Rights Division’s Disability Rights Section.