DOJ Sues New York Over Law Forcing Nursing Homes to House Men With Women

DOJ moves to intervene in case brought by Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne over state’s gender-identity housing requirements

The Justice Department said it intends to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a Catholic religious order, against the State of New York over a law requiring long-term care facilities to assign rooms based on residents’ gender identity rather than biological sex.

The Sisters, who have run Rosary Hill Home, a 42-bed nonprofit hospice and skilled nursing facility in Hawthorne, N.Y., for nearly 125 years, sued the state in April after the New York Department of Health issued warnings over the facility’s room-assignment and pronoun practices. The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division filed a complaint-in-intervention this week supporting the Sisters’ position.

“States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” said Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the 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. 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 Justice Department’s complaint argues that New York’s law, known as the LGBTQ+ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by holding religious facilities to requirements that conflict with their beliefs while allowing secular facilities exemptions the law doesn’t extend to faith-based objections. The federal government’s filing specifically points to a provision allowing facilities to decline opposite-sex room assignments based on a clinical judgment that the assignment could cause psychological harm, while offering no parallel accommodation for a religious objection.

New York’s law, enacted in 2024, requires long-term care facilities to honor residents’ gender identity in room assignments, bathroom access and the use of preferred names and pronouns. Facilities found in violation face fines of up to $2,000 for a first offense and up to $5,000 for repeat violations, according to the law’s enforcement provisions.

Rosary Hill houses residents in single-sex rooms based on biological sex and uses pronouns reflecting biological sex, practices the Sisters say flow directly from Catholic teaching that sex is given by God and cannot be changed. The Sisters’ filing describes their caregiving as including hands-on, intimate tasks — among them helping residents dress, do their hair and arrange their rooms — that they say cannot be separated from their religious understanding of the human body.

The case is among a series of religious-liberty actions the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has pursued under the current administration. The department’s Disability Rights Section is handling the matter.

By: Montana Newsroom wire