The Justice Department said it intends to intervene in a lawsuit filed by an order of Catholic nuns fighting a New York law requiring nursing homes to house biological males who identify as female with women.
The department threw its support Thursday behind the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a 125-year-old nonprofit institution that runs the Rosary Hill Home, in its challenge to the state’s 2024 law banning discrimination based on “actual or perceived sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or HIV status.”
The department’s Complaint-in-Intervention alleges that the law 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.”
U.S. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said states “should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology.”
“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days,” she said in a statement. “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 New York law, enforced by the State Department of Health, directs nursing homes to house patients and allow them access to restrooms that align with their gender identity – even if their roommates object – and refer to them by their preferred pronouns whether or not they are present.
The state’s training materials also require facilities to “create communities” that affirm patients’ sexual preferences and “accommodate patients’ desire for extramarital relations,” unless such conduct is banned across the board, according to the lawsuit filed in April in New York federal court.
Nursing homes that fail to meet those requirements face fines of up to $2,000 for the first violation and up to $5,000 for repeat violations. Facilities engaging in “willful violations” of public health law may be penalized with fines of up to $10,000 or one year in prison, or both.
The Justice Department said that “Catholic teaching holds that biological sex is God-given and cannot be morally changed, and that identifying a person by 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,’” said the department in its statement.
Democratic state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal sponsored the 2024 bill, which was backed by groups including Service and Advocacy for LGBT Elders, Equality New York and New Pride Agenda.
“While acceptance of LGBTQ individuals has grown in recent years, too often the clock winds back for LGBTQ elders entering long-term care,” Mr. Hoylman-Sigal told Gay City News in June 2023. “Eighty percent of LGBTQ adults in long-term care facilities hide their orientation when they move into a facility out of fear of discrimination. Our bill works to reverse this trend.”
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