President Donald Trump’s Justice Department has joined a lawsuit filed by an extremist religious freedom organization on behalf of nuns at a Catholic hospice in New York, challenging a state law requiring nursing facilities to affirm their patients’ gender identities.
The suit was filed in April by Colorado law firm First & Fourteenth, which is currently co-counsel with the Christian nationalist organization First Liberty Institute on another “religious discrimination” case in a U.S. District Court in Colorado.
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“The sisters do not want to litigate. They want this resolved, and they want to focus on their ministry,” L. Martin Nussbaum said in April as the lawyer spearheading the suit in the nuns’ name (despite their stated desire to stay out of court).
The Dominican Sisters operate a 42-bed end-of-life care facility called Rosary Hill Home in Westchester County. According to the nuns, patients at their cancer hospice are typically under their care for two to three months — they know they are dying when they arrive.
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Assistant Attorney General for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet K. Dhillon, said in a statement announcing the department’s participation in the lawsuit. “States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” she said.
“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent [very poor] cancer patients in their last days,” said the head of the DOJ division that Trump has weaponized in his anti-trans crusade. “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.”
That choice seems to have been imposed on the nuns by the preemptively filed lawsuit.
The law in question — The Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights for LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers and People Living with HIV, signed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) in 2023 — mandates that long-term care facilities in New York give patients access to bathrooms, hospital beds, and other amenities that align with their gender identities.
No complaint has been filed against the sisters over the law, the state has not taken any action against them, and the nuns maintain they’re never cared for a transgender patient.
In April, the sisters applied for an exemption to the law, but did not hear back immediately. At least one religious exemption has been provided by New York’s Department of Health, which administers the law, to the Church of Christ Scientist over the same concerns.
Despite those facts, First & Fourteenth convinced the sisters to sue, characterizing the state health department’s explanations of the law as formal “warnings” that the sisters were breaching it.
In an interview with the National Catholic Register publicizing the case, First & Fourteenth’s Nussbaum said one health department letter accused the sisters of refusing “to assign a room to a resident other than in accordance with the resident’s gender identity,” denying a trans resident use of a bathroom that aligned with their gender identity, and “willfully and repeatedly” failing to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns.
A state agency website, however, shows zero complaints against the Rosary Hill Home, and Nussbaum himself admits the sisters have never had trans people that they know of in their care, even as the Catholic Church says that any such people would need to be treated with respect and compassion.
“We don’t even have such patients,” Nussbaum said in the sisters’ name. “It’s the state requiring these holy nuns to bend the knee to an ideology contrary to their faith.”
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