On this July 4 celebration of the 250th anniversary of the formation of the United States, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and state lawmakers would do well to reflect on the principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence — and bring their state’s campaign of harassment of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne to an immediate and permanent end.

The Hawthorne Dominicans have run afoul of a law the New York Legislature passed in 2023, grandiosely titled the “Long-Term Care Facility Residents’ Bill of Rights for LGBTQIA+ New Yorkers and People Living With HIV.” Since the enactment of this extremist virtue-signaling legislation, New York’s public health agency has sent the nuns a trio of form letters instructing them to apply the new law’s provisions at their Rosary Hill Home, which has cared for terminally ill patients for more than 120 years. 

Along with instructing the facility’s staff to use “preferred pronouns” and to attend biennial “cultural competency” indoctrination sessions, these letters warned against restricting rooms and bathrooms based on biological sex. 

In other words, the nuns are supposed to jettison their long-standing policy of housing patients in single-sex settings, even though this policy is in place solely to allow Rosary Hill Home’s patients to live out the remainder of their lives in a manner that’s as comfortable for them as possible.

Obviously, complying with the public health agency’s demands would force the nuns to violate their heartfelt Catholic beliefs. Furthermore, the state’s attempted coercion is a classic case of imposing a “solution” for a problem that doesn’t exist. There has never been a single complaint associated with Rosary Hill Home’s existing policies. 

So, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne preemptively filed suit in April against Hochul and state health officials, asserting violations of the nuns’ constitutional rights of religious expression. And on June 18, the federal Department of Justice intervened in the case on behalf of the nuns, noting in a press release that “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.”

There is a mounting body of evidence that most Americans have lost patience with the forced imposition of gender ideology. Unfortunately, though, the message that the woke fever has broken in this area doesn’t appear to have gotten through to the progressive-minded governments that act as the legal enforcers of gender agendas. 

One might think that these governments would be less inclined to impose gender ideology and other controversial agendas in the face of the strengthening public pushback. Just the opposite is often the case, as the current legal action against the Hawthorne Dominicans shows. 

When objections arise against their cultural efforts to shift the landscape in their favor, gender ideology’s political proponents shift to an even more aggressive ideological mode that seeks to pound their opponents into submission via threats of legal sanctions.

This “progressive aggressive” philosophy was also recently on display in California, the only U.S. jurisdiction that rivals New York in terms of embracing gender ideology. There, four members of the San Francisco Giants baseball team received warnings from Major League Baseball after they inscribed verses from Scripture on the rainbow-hued caps they were forced to wear during a June 12 “Pride Night” game. 

An especially lamentable aspect of the coercion, with respect to issues associated with human sexuality and the sanctity of human life, is how frequently Catholic women’s religious orders are the targeted parties. The odious mentality in play here appears to be, “Ah well, you can’t make a progressive political omelet without breaking a few nuns.” 

Thankfully, at this political moment, the DOJ is hostile to gender ideology, not supportive. Consequently, if New York state’s public health agency doesn’t end its campaign to force the Rosary Hill Home to embrace transgenderism, it’s a virtual certainty the federal courts will intervene to uphold the religious-liberty rights of the nuns and other staff members.

But resolving this matter shouldn’t need court intervention. 

Gov. Hochul, who is Catholic herself, should immediately instruct her state’s healthcare bureaucrats to stop treading on the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne — and instead allow them, as faithfully Catholic American citizens, to continue their loving Christian care of the terminally ill without any further unjustified interference.