by Tablet Staff
The Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict have joined the lawsuit the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne filed against the state in April, challenging its gender identity mandates.
At the heart of the issue is New York’s LGBTQ Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights, which, effective May 2024, prohibits long-term care facilities and their staff from discriminating against any resident based on gender identity. The mandate only exempts facilities operated by the Church of Christ, Scientist.
The Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict operate St. Joseph’s Home for the Aged, a 60-bed assisted living facility in Huntington, New York. They have served elderly, infirm residents for over 50 years, and they accept no government funding.
“I fully support the sisters’ decision to seek relief from New York’s gender ideology mandate being imposed on nursing homes and adult care facilities,” said Bishop John Barres of Rockville Centre, where the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict conduct their ministry. “Sometimes Catholics need to take a stand for their Catholic values, and the Benedictine Sisters are doing that.”
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, meanwhile, operate Rosary Hill Home, which is a 42-bed skilled nursing facility that provides palliative care and comfort to terminal cancer patients. They sued the state in April, and the Department of Justice has since joined.
The mandate, the lawsuit states, “prohibits Rosary Hill Home and its staff from assigning patients to rooms by biological sex, prohibits segregating restrooms by biological sex, requires the use of patients’ preferred pronouns even when the patient is not present, and requires allowing patients to cross-dress.”
RELATED: Dominican Sisters Challenge New York State Gender-Identity Law
The sisters and the facility face fines, injunctions, potential loss of licensing, and imprisonment if they fail to comply, according to the lawsuit.
With the lawsuit, which was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, and now the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, are asking the court to declare that the mandate violates the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, prevent the state from enforcing the mandate against them, and award them “the costs of this action and reasonable attorney’s fees as provided by law,” as well as “such other and further relief as the Court deems equitable and just.”
In a statement to The Tablet back when the lawsuit was filed, a spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health stood by the mandate.
“While the Department does not comment on pending or ongoing litigation,” they said, “the NYS Department of Health is committed to following state law, which provides nursing home residents certain rights protecting against discrimination including, but not limited to, gender identity or expression.”
Gov. Kathy Hochul, when it was passed, hailed the mandate as allowing New York’s seniors to live with “the dignity and respect they deserve, free from discrimination.”
“LGBTQIA+ and HIV-positive seniors are among our most vulnerable populations,” she said in a statement, “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. Hate will never have a place in New York.”
Andrew Nussbaum, the attorney representing the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, said the state’s mandate “is particularly egregious because the state exempts care facilities operated by the Christian Science Church but not other religions, and because it permits secular clinical judgment but not religious clinical judgment.”