The U.S. Department of Justice is moving to intervene in a lawsuit challenging a New York law that requires long-term-care facilities to accommodate residents based on gender identity rather than biological sex, arguing that the state may be unlawfully discriminating against religious organizations.
The lawsuit, filed April 6 by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, challenges New York’s LGBTQ long-term care facility residents’ bill of rights. The Catholic religious order operates Rosary Hill Home, a nonprofit hospice and skilled nursing facility in Hawthorne, N.Y., that has provided free end-of-life care to indigent cancer patients for more than a century.
The complaint contends that the law requires facilities to assign rooms, permit bathroom access and use names and pronouns according to a resident’s gender identity, in conflict with the religious beliefs of the Catholic Church. The suit also alleges that noncompliance could expose the facility to fines, loss of licensure and other penalties.
Federal officials argued that the law treats religious organizations differently from secular facilities by allowing certain nonreligious exemptions, but provides no comparable accommodation for faith-based objections.
In a letter sent to U.S. District Judge Nelson S. Román of the Southern District of New York on Thursday, Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, wrote that the case may violate the Equal Protection Clause and that the attorney general has certified these cases as of “general public importance.”
Dhillon wrote that the Justice Department will submit a “complaint in intervention” alleging that New York has “engaged in unlawful discrimination on the basis of religion.”
“For more than a century, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided free palliative care to indigent cancer patients in their last days,” Dhillon stated. “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.”
