Arizona Democrats Are Declaring War on the Catholic Church Again
Progressive policy ambitions meet practical realities as Americans weigh costs and consequences.
Nuns running hospice care for the dying are being told by the state of New York that they have to house biological men with the elderly women in their care, or else. That's the actual policy at issue in the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne case, and it tells you everything about where this fight has landed. This isn't a debate about tax exemptions or Sunday closing laws anymore.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
While Democrats pander to and elevate Islamists across the country, there's one religion they have no problem trying to suppress and persecute. In New York and other East Coast states, several orders of Catholic nuns are fighting legal battles against the government.
For more than a decade, the Little Sisters of the Poor have been trying to stop the government from forcing them to pay for employees' birth control and abortions, and now the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne are suing New York over its trans policies that would force the sisters to not only use "preferred pronouns," but house so-called "transwomen" with actual women in their facilities.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
Nuns running hospice care for the dying are being told by the state of New York that they have to house biological men with the elderly women in their care, or else. That's the actual policy at issue in the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne case, and it tells you everything about where this fight has landed. This isn't a debate about tax exemptions or Sunday closing laws anymore. It's the government reaching into a convent and dictating who sleeps down the hall from a ninety-year-old woman receiving end-of-life care.
And the Little Sisters saga just keeps going. A decade-plus of litigation over whether an order of nuns who've taken vows of poverty can be forced to underwrite abortion coverage should have ended a long time ago. It didn't, because for a certain kind of official, making an example out of Catholic nuns is worth the legal fees. These are not powerful institutions throwing their weight around. They're women who took vows to serve the poor and dying, now spending years and donor money in court just to keep running their own facilities their own way.
What makes this particularly rich is the selective nerve involved. The same politicians who tie themselves in knots to avoid offending other faiths seem to feel nothing about steamrolling Catholic sisters over pronouns and contraceptive mandates. Nobody's demanding an imam adjust his theology to state HR policy. But an order of nuns caring for the dying gets sued over gender ideology like it's a Fortune 500 company that needs correcting.
If Arizona Democrats are following this same playbook, as the piece suggests, it's worth asking what exactly they think they're accomplishing. These orders aren't going away. They've survived worse than a state health department. But the message being sent, over and over, is that religious conviction is tolerated right up until it conflicts with the preferred politics of the moment, and then it isn't tolerated at all.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.