New York governor Kathy Hochul recently made headlines for decriminalizing assisted suicide, claiming as motivation her compassion for the terminally ill. Now her state\u2019s public health agency has targeted Catholic sisters who actually serve them. For 126 years, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne have provided end-of-life care for cancer patients free of charge. Their foundress, Venerable Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of author Nathaniel Hawthorne, established Rosary Hill as a home where anyone, regardless of creed, would be treated with dignity and love at the end of his or her life. None of that, however, satisfies the voracious cravings of woke ideology.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The New York State Department of Health has issued warnings to the sisters for failing to adopt policies that would grant residents access to bedrooms or restrooms aligned with their professed \u201cgender identity\u201d rather than biological sex, and for declining to commit to using residents\u2019 preferred pronouns. Even more sinisterly, no complaints have been filed against Rosary Hill, and their attorney has stated that no residents even fall into these categories of gender confusion. These warnings are intimidation, pure and simple, and the bullying shows no signs of abating. Under the law\u2019s provisions, the sisters must undergo \u201ccultural competency\u201d training every two years to ensure compliance with this dystopian agenda.\u00a0<\/p>\n
That the law in question passed with almost unanimous, bipartisan support signals that many legislators in Albany never envisioned it as a cudgel to browbeat Catholic sisters. Yet here we are, and this case will wend its familiar way through the court system. There is reason to expect that a Supreme Court that has shown unprecedented sympathy for religiously motivated plaintiffs will rule in the sisters\u2019 favor. A string of recent cases has established a strong precedent: Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025) allowed parents to opt their children out of LGBTQ-themed lessons in school; Fulton v. City of Philadelphia (2021) held that the defendant could not exclude a Catholic foster care agency that refused placement with same-sex couples. The Masterpiece ruling in 2018 sided with the baker Jack Phillips, who refused to create a cake for a same-sex wedding. The court has ruled in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby in seeking exemptions from the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The likelihood of a Supreme Court victory, though, is no cause for celebration. In the first place, this pattern of harassment still exacts a toll, involving years of litigation and efforts that should be spent caring for the dying, not defending the right to do so. But these religious liberty cases also run the risk of ghettoizing free speech and public witness to the truth. While the Dominican Sisters seek a religious exemption from the law\u2019s mandate, it would seem that a non-religiously affiliated nursing home has no such recourse. Why should they be forced to pretend, through bathroom access or pronoun usage, that a man is a woman or vice versa? Refusing to acquiesce is not primarily a matter of theology, but of basic biological reality. One need not and should not have to believe in God to be able to insist that he is not she.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Stemming from the controversy over the Affordable Care Act\u2019s contraceptive mandate, these debates have been almost entirely framed as matters of religious liberty. The most visible response was the 2012 initiative \u201cFortnight for Freedom,\u201d a period of prayerful resistance to encroachments on religious-based practices. Part of the danger, though, in carving out these exemptions under the aegis of religious belief is that it cedes the rest of the public square. Rejecting contraceptive coverage or incorrect pronouns can then seem like niche peculiarities, something from which outr\u00e9 believers can opt out while the rest of the world continues its descent into madness.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Perhaps this lawsuit, and others like it that are sure to follow, can become a galvanizing moment that encourages people, religious believers or not, to argue for the truth more assertively and not to be content with scraps from the government\u2019s table. Groups like the Dominican Sisters, and those who agree with them, should make the case that they are not opposed to this law because it violates their religious beliefs, but that it violates their religious beliefs because it is wrong in itself. And wrong not just for them, but for everyone, because it perpetuates falsehood. In the case of the Dominican Sisters, it perpetuates a falsehood about the human person and his or her inherent and immutable biological sex. In the case of the Little Sisters and Hobby Lobby, it perpetuates a falsehood about human sexuality, the unitive and procreative end that contraception thwarts. Simply to hope that religious belief suffices to earn an exemption from a law that is wrong on the merits is to win a battle while losing the larger war. The Dominican Sisters of Rosary Hill are right to challenge this absurd mandate, and their quest for justice should remind everyone that, when it comes to affirming fundamental truths, there remains a hill worth dying on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New York governor Kathy Hochul recently made headlines for decriminalizing assisted suicide, claiming as motivation her compassion for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[9,11,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-196435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-new-york-headlines","10":"tag-new-york-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}