For over 125 years, the Dominican Sisters located in Hawthorne, New York, have provided comfort and nursing care for patients who are poor and suffering from incurable cancer. Nuns are faced with fines, court orders, the potential loss of licensing, and jail time if they do not comply with the State’s new transgender mandate. However, the law exempts Christian Scientists. The sisters filed suit in federal court to protect their ministry and their patients.
The services are free, and the indigent people could end up on the street to die with no one to comfort them, no one to care for them, or help them find peace.
Mother Marie Edward Deutsch, Superior General of the Hawthorne Dominicans, said that the sisters’ first reaction was disappointment. “We Sisters have taken care of patients from all walks of life, ideologies, and faiths; we treat each patient with dignity and Christian charity; we have never had complaints. We cannot implement New York’s mandate without violating our Catholic faith,” she explained.
Apparently, not having complaints is of no concern to secular and liberal [leftist] Democrats, who seem to be doing all they can to undermine what has been considered normative behavior for millennia.
The New York gender ideology mandate requires Rosary Hill Home and other long-term care facilities in the state to house biological men in women’s rooms even over the opposition of a female roommate, to permit residents and their visitors of one sex to access bathrooms set aside for those of the opposite sex, to use false pronouns, to use language and “create communities” affirming patients’ sexual preferences, and to accommodate patients desire for extramarital sexual relations. Long-term care facilities are also required to ensure that their staff members are trained in “cultural competency” informed by the state’s gender ideology.
From the Supreme Court on down, federal courts have repeatedly protected Catholic nuns from compelled participation in activities that violate their faith, such as abortion and birth control coverage in their health plans, in Democrat-run states and presidential administrations.
Always hoping for a miracle in court, New York is again requiring a religious order to carry out the state’s ideology, this time as it applies to gender identity.
New York exempted Christian Scientists, but not Catholics.
The lawsuit notably argues that New York’s LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights is not religiously neutral because it exempts facilities run by Christian Scientists, carving out “bona fide members and adherents of a recognized religious organization whose teachings include reliance on spiritual means through prayer alone for healing.”
This alleged Establishment Clause violation mirrors a Maine law struck down by SCOTUS for allowing families to use tuition assistance at religious schools with “watered down” beliefs, in Justice Samuel Alito’s words, but not “sectarian” schools, in the law’s words.
The Hochul Requirements
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne operate Rosary Hill Home, which is a 42-bed skilled nursing facility that provides palliative care and comfort to terminal cancer patients. The mandate, the lawsuit states, “prohibits Rosary Hill Home and its staff from assigning patients to rooms by biological sex, prohibits segregating restrooms by biological sex, requires the use of patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present, and requires allowing patients to cross-dress.”
They risk jail time if they don’t abide by Hochul’s ideology.
The New York Department of Health also requires facilities to “create communities” that affirm patients’ sexual preferences and “accommodate patients’ desire for extramarital relations.
Hochul and her band of fake liberals are evil.