For a sense of how stubbornly Democrats are dug in against religious liberty in general—and nuns in particular—consider the case of Rosary Hill Home, a 42-bed nursing facility in Hawthorne, New York, run by a congregation of Dominican sisters who for 125 years have been caring for dying cancer patients who are in financial need. The mission of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne: “We cannot cure our patients, but we can assure the dignity and value of their final days and keep them comfortable and free of pain.” Neither they nor Rosary Hill accept payment from patients or their families. They receive no government or insurance funding. They rely on their own labor and the generosity of donors. And for the four-year reporting period that concluded in January, the New York State Department of Health received zero complaints about the home and issued zero citations—in a state that averaged 23 citations per nursing home.
Now New York is threatening to fine the home and the sisters, strip their license, and potentially imprison their staff. Their crime? Refusing to affirm a government-mandated ideology that flatly contradicts their Catholic faith.
Governor Kathy Hochul signed New York’s LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights into law in 2023. The law requires long-term care facilities to house patients by stated “gender identity” rather than biological sex—even over a roommate’s objection. It requires bathrooms to be opened to persons of the opposite biological sex. It requires staff to use patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient isn’t present. It mandates ideological “cultural competency” training designed to ensure that employees can “[c]reate communities welcoming to residents with diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.” And it requires the facilities to post a public notice affirming compliance with all of the above—effectively compelling the sisters to publicly declare they will do things their faith forbids. Since March 2024, the Health Department has sent the sisters three “Dear Administrator Letters” demanding compliance.
On April 6, the sisters and Rosary Hill filed a complaint in the Southern District of New York seeking declaratory and injunctive relief on First and Fourteenth Amendment grounds. The complaint makes clear that for these plaintiffs, this isn’t a mere bureaucratic inconvenience. It’s a direct assault on “foundational Catholic beliefs related to human sexuality.” The Church teaches that sex is a God-given biological reality “inscribed into every cell in the human body,” that using false pronouns constitutes a form of lying, and that requiring a Catholic to affirm another’s sex as other than what it is amounts to compelling assent to an inconsistent religious worldview. The complaint makes clear that all people, including those struggling with their gender identity, “deserve compassion, sensitivity, and respect.” But compassion does not mean a Catholic may “contradict reason and truth.”
The constitutional problems are serious and layered. New York carved out an explicit exemption for facilities operated by the Christian Science Church while providing zero exemption for any other faith tradition. So the plaintiffs have a free exercise claim even by the Supreme Court’s stringent standard (increasingly criticized in recent years as overly stringent) in Employment Division v. Smith (1990): A law that is not neutral and generally applicable must satisfy strict scrutiny. This one cannot. In fact, the state’s discrimination between Christian Scientists and Catholics is the basis for additional counts in the complaint under the Establishment Clause and Equal Protection Clause.
The sisters have also raised a compelled-speech claim: The state is literally requiring them to post a notice affirming policies that violate their religious convictions and to train their employees in an ideology they regard as false and harmful. And the mandate reaches not just institutional conduct but individual speech. Staff must use preferred pronouns even when the patient isn’t in the room. The plaintiffs also invoke the religious autonomy doctrine—the notion “that religious institutions are entitled to make decisions concerning their internal affairs free from government interference”—and the related ministerial exception, both of which are well established in Supreme Court precedent.
How many times must people of faith defend their sincerely held beliefs against government overreach? From Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores (2014) to Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania (2020), the Court has struck down government mandates that violate religious convictions or rejected blue-state attempts to block relief from those mandates. New York’s mandate is at least as egregious as the conduct in those cases, which involved statutory questions connected to contraception mandates, and it may well be worse. After all, the state is compelling a congregation of nuns to speak falsehoods, redesign their sacred spaces, and train their staff in an ideology their faith explicitly condemns.
The Left tends to frame these conflicts as if theirs is the compassionate side, fighting against intolerance and bigotry. The offensiveness of that framing is particularly jarring in light of Rosary Hill’s “numerous, tender, and 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,” as the complaint notes. The sisters extend their care to “those of all religions and backgrounds, seeing in each patient the face of Christ.” Their record of zero complaints speaks for itself.
What New York is demanding is not tolerance. It is submission. And when the state threatens Catholic nuns with jail time for practicing their faith while operating one of the most selfless healthcare ministries in the country, something has gone badly wrong. The sisters are right to fight back—and the Constitution gives them the tools to win.