The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have spent more than a century providing free palliative care to indigent cancer patients at Rosary Hill Home. They don't charge a dime. They take in people in their final days — people from all walks of life, every faith, every background — and care for them until the end. New York State looked at that operation and decided the real problem was the nuns' pronouns.
Now Trump's Justice Department is in their corner.
On June 23, Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon — who leads the DOJ's Civil Rights Division — announced the department had formally intervened in Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne v. Hochul, backing the nuns' challenge against New York's LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents' Bill of Rights. The law, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul, requires facilities to affirm patients' stated gender identity, use preferred pronouns, and house biological men with women. Refuse, and you face fines in the thousands of dollars, license revocation, and potential incarceration of up to one year.
For nuns. Running a free hospice.
The New York State Department of Health started sending compliance letters to the Sisters in March 2024, demanding they implement the mandate or face consequences. Mother Marie Edward, O.P., the Sisters' representative, laid out the situation plainly: "We Sisters have taken care of patients from all walks of life, ideologies, and faiths. 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."
No complaints. Zero. Not one patient or family member has come forward to say the Dominican Sisters failed them. The state decided to fix something nobody reported as broken.
Dhillon framed the DOJ's involvement around the obvious constitutional problem. "States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology," she said. She went further in describing the specific absurdity of this case: "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."
That's the leverage Albany chose to use — threaten to shut down a free hospice for the dying poor unless Catholic nuns affirm gender ideology. The state isn't arguing these patients are being mistreated. It's arguing the nuns aren't affirming the right things.
Martin Nussbaum, General Counsel of the Catholic Benefits Association, noted the significance of the federal government's formal certification in the case. "Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's formal certification sends a welcome signal that a state's policy preference for gender ideology does not trump the protection for religious freedom embedded in our country's DNA," Nussbaum said.
What makes New York's position especially difficult to defend is the selectivity. As American Wire News reported, the state already carves out exemptions for Church of Christ Scientist facilities under existing law. Religious accommodations exist in New York's regulatory framework — they're just not extended to Catholic organizations when gender ideology is on the table.
The penalties tell you how serious Albany is about this. We're not talking about a sternly worded letter. Thousands of dollars in fines. License revocation — meaning the Sisters would be forced to close Rosary Hill Home entirely. And criminal penalties carrying up to a year in jail. For running a charity hospice according to Catholic teaching.
The DOJ's intervention changes the legal calculus significantly. This isn't just a religious order fighting a state bureaucracy anymore. The full weight of the federal Civil Rights Division is now on the nuns' side, arguing that New York's mandate violates religious liberty protections that predate every gender identity regulation on the books.
Governor Hochul's administration now has to explain to a federal court why the state needs to threaten nuns with jail time over pronoun usage at a facility where no one has complained. The Dominican Sisters have been doing this work since the 1800s. They've outlasted two world wars, the Great Depression, and every cultural revolution in between.
A state mandate about preferred pronouns wasn't going to be the thing that stopped them. But it's revealing that someone in Albany thought it should be.
