The Trump Justice Department has stepped into a major religious liberty battle, backing an order of Catholic nuns challenging a New York law that would force them to house biological men with female patients in their residential hospice facility.

As The Gateway Pundit reported in April 2026, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a 125-year-old order of Catholic nuns, were forced to sue radical New York Governor Kathy Hochul and her administration after the state threatened them with fines, license revocation, and even jail time for refusing to house biological men identifying as women in rooms with terminally ill female cancer patients at their free Rosary Hill Home hospice.

The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Governor Kathy Hochul and the state Department of Health.

The law, the LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, requires nursing homes to assign patient rooms based on gender identity even over a roommate’s objection, use preferred pronouns including when the patient is not present, allow restroom access based on gender identity, and post public notices of compliance.

The Sisters argue that the state’s transgender accommodation mandate violates their constitutional rights and threatens their ability to continue their century-old mission of caring for the dying poor.

The state sent the sisters three “Dear Administrator Letters” in March 2024, October 2024, and January 2025, notifying them of their obligation to comply. The sisters stated they have not complied, and do not intend to.

The law applies to all licensed nursing homes in New York State, with the trigger being the state license to operate rather than the receipt of state funding. Courts have generally allowed the government to attach conditions to public funding, but applying mandates to private religious organizations that take no public funds is a significantly harder legal argument for the state, and more likely to be seen as direct infringement on religious freedom and free speech. New York granted an exemption to facilities run by the Church of Christ, Scientist, but not to Catholic institutions.

On Thursday, the Department of Justice notified a federal court that it intends to intervene in a lawsuit brought by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne against the State of New York.

“States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division declared.

“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.”

The DOJ’s Complaint-in-Intervention directly alleges that New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2 violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. The law forces long-term care facilities to assign rooms and require staff to use names and pronouns based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex.

Crucially, the statute allows secular facilities to refuse opposite-sex room assignments based on “clinical judgments” that it would cause psychological harm to a roommate but offers zero equivalent accommodation for religious facilities that object on grounds of spiritual harm and Catholic teaching that biological sex is God-given and immutable.

This is blatant religious discrimination. New York even carved out an exemption for Christian Science facilities while targeting these Catholic nuns who have served the dying poor for over a century without taking one penny of government money.

Jim Hᴏft Jim Hᴏft is the founder and editor of The Gateway Pundit, one of the top conservative news outlets in America. Jim was awarded the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award in 2013 and is the proud recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Online Journalism from the Americans for Prosperity Foundation in May 2016.

You can email Jim Hᴏft here, and read more of Jim Hᴏft's articles here.

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