Doug Mainwaring/US Correspondent.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has notified the U.S. District Court that it intends to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne against the State of New York, challenging a State law that requires housing biological men with women in the Sisters’ residential hospice care program.
The DOJ announced in a press statement that it supports the Sisters of Hawthorne’s argument that the New York law violates the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection of religious groups.
The Dominican Sisters, who for over 125 years have provided nursing care to poor patients dying from cancer, had been forced to go to court to fight against the state’s transgender mandate requiring them to use “preferred” pronouns and assign rooms based on patients’ chosen “gender identity.”
‘States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,’
The mandate, which stems from New York’s so-called “Bill of Rights for Long-Term Care Facility Residents who are LGBTQ or Living with HIV,” would force the sisters to violate their Catholic faith in order to avoid fines, court orders, potential loss of licensing, and jail time.
The shocking mandate demands that the sisters, who run the 42-bed Rosary Hill Home, house biological men in women’s rooms even over the objection of a female roommate, permit residents and their visitors of one sex to access bathrooms set aside for those of the opposite sex, use false pronouns, use language and “create communities” affirming patients’ sexual preferences, and accommodate patients’ desire for extramarital sexual relations.
The mandate further requires the sisters to use patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present, post notices affirming compliance with these requirements, and ensure all staff receive “cultural competency” training indoctrinating them in gender ideology.
“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 K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’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. 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,” said Dhillon.
“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,” notes the DOJ’s statement. “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.”
