Why Do New York and Other Blue States Persist in Beating Up on Nuns?

The persecution of nuns and their charities is becoming an ugly hallmark of blue-state bigotry.

For 14 years, the Little Sisters of the Poor have been dragged through the courts for refusing to violate their religious conscience. They twice prevailed before the U.S. Supreme Court, yet Pennsylvania and New Jersey are continuing a lawsuit whose purpose and effect would be to eliminate the federal religious exemption that exempts the nuns from complying with a contraceptive mandate. In New York, the Sisters of Life had to go to court after the state demanded information from pregnancy centers that would have revealed their donors’ identities and sensitive personal information of women who sought help from their program.

Now it’s the turn of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.

These nuns have spent more than a century providing free care to poor people dying from cancer. New York nevertheless seeks to make their continued service contingent on compliance with state directives concerning gender identity, pronouns, room assignments, bathrooms, and staff training. The sisters argue that these mandates violate the tenets of their faith and their First Amendment rights.

In a sharply written Wall Street Journal column, John J. Miller traces the order’s origins to Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rose was inspired in part by a passage in which her father described overcoming his initial reluctance to embrace a desperately poor child. She called this passage “the greatest my father ever wrote.”

Miller then brings the story into the present:

“Rather than thanking the sisters for their kindness to the dying poor, the letters demanded obedience to the state’s rules on gender identity.”

These are not, however, nuns on the run. They are standing firm in defending their religious freedom, though at great cost. Why do state bureaucrats double-down on persecuting these brave nuns (of all people)?

Because, Miller writes, if progressive government “can make nuns abandon their religious principles and kneel to the state, then it can force anybody to submit.”

Miller’s account is worth reading in full. It raises a question that should not be ideological or partisan: Why must people who devote their lives to serving the poor repeatedly go to court simply to preserve the faith that inspires their service?
​
A pluralistic country should have room for differing views on contraception, abortion, sexuality, and gender. It should have no room for government officials who try to force religious orders to violate their traditional beliefs, which are also held by millions of American Catholics, or for state bureaucrats who attempt to rewrite canon law.

DONATE & HELP US DEFEND YOUR FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS