The Justice Department has stepped into a case brought by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, arguing that a New York law forcing housing and pronoun policies based on gender identity clashes with religious freedom and equal protection; the suit centers on Rosary Hill Home’s practices, key legal claims under the Fourteenth Amendment and 42 U.S.C. § 2000h-2, and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division taking the matter up through its Disability Rights Section.
The Justice Department notified a federal court it plans to intervene in a lawsuit filed by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who operate a residential hospice and skilled nursing facility in New York. The Sisters say the state’s rules would force them to act against their religious convictions in the way they house and care for patients. This move makes the dispute a national-level fight over the balance between state policy and religious liberty.
The legal challenge targets New York Public Health Law § 2803-c-2, the statute at the center of the dispute, which the Sisters contend requires them to violate their religious beliefs. The United States supports the Sisters’ position that the law runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause when it treats religious facilities differently than secular ones. The complaint-in-intervention lays out that differential treatment as the constitutional problem the court should correct.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division framed the issue bluntly. “States should take notice that they cannot require Americans to abandon their religious beliefs in the name of woke gender ideology,” said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “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 law at issue directs long-term care facilities to assign rooms based on “gender identity” rather than biological sex, and it requires staff to use names and pronouns that reflect a resident’s declared gender identity. The Sisters argue those mandates collide with their religious teachings and operational practices, which are organized around biological sex. The complaint says the statute treats secular clinical judgments and religious convictions unequally.
New York’s statute allows facilities to refuse opposite-sex room assignments when staff determine the pairing would cause psychological harm to a roommate, but it has no comparable carve-out for religious judgments that such an assignment would cause spiritual harm. That asymmetry is central to the equal protection argument: secular concerns get special accommodation while religious concerns do not. The Justice Department says that gap cannot stand under constitutional principles governing religious liberty.
The Acting Attorney General certified the case under 42 U.S.C. § 2000h-2, which permits the United States to intervene in equal protection suits that have wide public importance. That procedural step signals the federal government believes the legal questions here extend beyond this single facility. It also allows the Civil Rights Division to press constitutional claims on behalf of religious organizations facing state mandates.
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The Dominican Sisters run Rosary Hill Home, a facility known for free palliative care to indigent cancer patients at the end of life, and they emphasize their willingness to accept any patient who needs care. Their operations follow Catholic teachings that frame biological sex as God-given and immutable, and that identifying a person as another sex is religiously prohibited lying. In practice, Rosary Hill houses patients in single-sex rooms based on biological sex, uses pronouns that reflect biological sex, and performs “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.”
The Civil Rights Division’s Disability Rights Section is leading the federal work on this matter, bringing enforcement experience in protecting disabled individuals in long-term care settings. That Section enforces federal civil rights laws for people receiving palliative and long-term care, and it will press the constitutional and statutory issues the complaint raises. Members of the public who believe they have experienced religious discrimination can file complaints with the Civil Rights Division through its public intake processes.
