Catholic nuns at the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, New York, run Rosary Hill Home, a 42-bed hospice care facility for the poor there. On April 6 they filed a lawsuit because New York state officials are violating their constitutional rights.
Since March the state’s Health Department has sent three letters to the nuns warning them they had to come into compliance with New York’s woke LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights. Under the law, if a biological man said he was a women and demands to room with biological females, the nuns would be forced to comply, even over objections from the women patients.
The 57-page state guideline advises caretakers to ask patients questions “to help you better understand how they self-identify” that “stresses the importance of pronouns.” It even says the caretakers — in this case the nuns — should share their pronouns.
“We Sisters have taken care of patients from all walks of life, ideologies and faiths,” Mother Marie Edward, general superior of the Hawthorne Dominicans, said in a statement. “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.”
Transgender medicine can’t alter sex
“Transgender medicine can change surface appearance but never sex. And Scripture forbids lying to another about reality,” the nuns’ lawsuit says. “It would contradict the teachings of the Bible concerning God’s creative sovereignty, contradict reason and truth, and betray our sacred obligation not to knowingly harm other persons, particularly the most vulnerable.
“People who struggle with their gender identity deserve compassion, sensitivity, and respect,” it says. But the state’s mandate prohibiting segregation of rooms and bathrooms by biological sex is something the nuns can’t agree to without violating their constitutionally protected religious beliefs and their scientific convictions.
Along with the state’s violations of those rights, the lawsuit explains the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause is also being abrogated. Before filing the suit, the Dominican Sisters wrote to the state asking for an exemption to the law. It was met with silence. Yet Christian Scientists, who believe disease and illness are mental problems and that their followers should rely on prayer rather than medical care, have been given an exemption.
The nuns, who have cared for people with incurable cancer for more than 100 years for free, without any insurance requirement and without government funds, now face fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and even jail time.
In a letter to the Wall Street Journal, Maureen McGrath Svoboda describes how her father, a dentist, used to bring boxes of toothpaste and brushes to the Rosary Hill home, a small token of gratitude for the sisters’ work. “It’s heart-wrenching” to learn what these nuns now face, she wrote. The state’s mandate “places an absurd burden on a ministry that asks only for the right to serve the dying.”