A religious liberty law firm has convinced nuns at a Catholic hospice in Westchester County, New York to sue the state over rules it says violate their religious and free speech rights.

The state rules at issue are contained in legislation signed in 2023 by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D). The law, The Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights for LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers and People Living with HIV, mandates that long-term care facilities in New York give patients access to bathrooms, hospital beds, and other amenities that align with their gender identities.

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The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne are represented by Colorado law firm First & Fourteenth, which is currently co-counsel with extremist religious liberty organization First Liberty Institute on another “religious discrimination” case in U.S. District Court in Colorado.

New York state officials haven’t taken any action against the sisters, who operate a 42-bed nursing care facility called Rosary Hill Home, but First & Fourteenth has preemptively filed the suit anyway, arguing officials might one day prosecute the hospice.

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“The sisters do not want to litigate. They want this resolved, and they want to focus on their ministry,” said L. Martin Nussbaum, the lawyer spearheading the suit in the nuns’ name, despite the sisters’ stated desire to stay out of court.

One provision in the law requires long-term care staff to undergo cultural competency training, which First & Fourteenth’s lawsuit calls “indoctrination.” The lawsuit also claims that the sisters object to rules mandating that they use patients’ preferred pronouns, and what it describes as forcing them to “accommodate patients’ desire for extramarital relations.”

Nussbaum cites a letter the sisters received, allegedly “warning” them that their nursing home can’t “restrict a resident’s right to associate with other residents or with visitors, including the right to consensual expression of intimacy or sexual relations, unless the restriction is uniformly applied to all residents in a nondiscriminatory manner.”

Another letter which Nussbaum characterized as a “warning” during his interview with the National Catholic Register publicizing the case, implied the sisters had refused “to assign a room to a resident other than in accordance with the resident’s gender identity,” denied a trans resident use of a bathroom that aligned with their gender identity, and “willfully and repeatedly” failed to use a resident’s preferred name or pronouns.

A state agency website, however, shows zero complaints against the Rosary Hill Home.

Those “warnings” may in fact turn out to be written explanations of the law’s straightforward, anti-discrimination provisions for facilities where trans people reside, and not the menacing threats from the government officials that Nussbaum describes.

Nussbaum himself admits the sisters have never had trans people that they know of in their care, even as the Church says that any such people would need to be treated with respect and compassion.

“We don’t even have such patients,” Nussbaum said in the sisters’ name. “It’s the state requiring these holy nuns to bend the knee to an ideology contrary to their faith.”

In other words, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne may have been enlisted in a nonexistent battle they have no desire to fight, in a culture war far from their work caring for the dying.

According to the sisters, patients at their hospice for people suffering from cancer are typically under their care for two to three months. They know they are dying when they arrive.

“This is our strength. If our faith wasn’t there, the type of care we provide would not be the same,” said Sister Stella Mary, the superior of Rosary Hill Home.

“I’m not saying that other people cannot do so, but the things and the environment that permeates in this place is very different because of our faith, because Christ is here present in the Eucharist,” she said.

“And anybody that comes in here will always say how peaceful it feels in here, the difference from any other place that they’ve been to,” the sister superior shared.

“There is no way we could do what we do day in and day out, with the difficulties that caring for the sick means, without having our faith,” she added.

When signing the 2023 law, Hochul said, “New York’s seniors should be able to live their lives with the dignity and respect they deserve, free from discrimination of every kind.”

“LGBTQIA + and HIV-positive seniors are among our most vulnerable populations, and today we are taking steps to ensure that all New Yorkers — regardless of who they are, who they love, or their HIV status — find safety and support in places where they need it the most,” Hochul continued. “Hate will never have a place in New York.”

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