Kathy Hochul Campaign Surrogates Oppose Nuns Providing Care To Terminally Ill
New York Democrats want voters to side with elderly gender-confused citizens over Catholic nuns taking care of the terminally ill.
A campaign surrogate for New York Governor Kathy Hochul defended a state law that requires long-term care facilities to house gender-confused men with women. By extension, he also attacked the Catholic nuns who provide free care to terminally ill cancer patients and who are suing to be exempted from the burdensome requirements.
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne are currently suing to be exempted from a bipartisan New York law that would require them to house gender-confused men with women and mandate they use the preferred pronouns of all patients.
The law also requires them to allow patients to commit adultery.
The state has sent them several threatening letters for reportedly being out of compliance, as Legal Insurrection previously reported. While all these practices are clearly in contradiction to Catholic Church teaching on sexuality and gender, the religious sisters have not received an exemption. The state law explicitly exempts only the Christian Scientists from the requirement.
Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman has wisely seized on the lawsuit as a campaign issue, criticizing Gov. Hochul for signing the law.
“What Kathy Hochul is doing to the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne is an absolute disgrace,” he told the New York Post. “For over 120 years, these incredible women have done God’s work, providing unconditional love, comfort, and dignity to people in their final days.”
He called the religious sisters “saints walking among us” and accused Hochul of wanting “to shut them down, strip away their license, and throw terminal cancer patients out on the street—all to enforce her woke garbage.”
This is the sort of unforced error that a political consultant probably should have told Hochul to avoid.
After all, there is no evidence of widespread discrimination in New York against lesbian or gender-confused nursing home residents. In any case, the nuns do not reject someone who is same-sex attracted or gender-confused – they just won’t indulge their every demand.
But politics being what it is, some leaders think the real villains here are the people fighting to stop the law.
“Bruce Blakeman wants to follow Trump’s lead to deny elderly LGBTQ+ New Yorkers the care they need when at their most vulnerable,” Manhattan Assemblyman Tony Simone said, according to the New York Post. He accused Blakeman of “weaponizing seniors’ health” and “joining with homophobes.”
Blakeman, not Hochul, is the real extremist, according to Simone, a campaign surrogate for the Democratic governor.
The law’s sponsor, Brad Hoylman-Sigal, echoed these attacks.
“Bruce Blakeman and the homophobes he campaigns with are opposed to marriage equality and even flying Pride flags,” the Manhattan borough president said. “Now, they want to play politics with the lives of older LGBTQ New Yorkers. It won’t fly in New York.”
By extension, it is the Catholic nuns who are fighting to operate their nursing home in the same way they did all the way until 2023, when this radical LGBT law was passed, who are also extremists.
There are around 600 nursing homes across the state, but Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James have chosen to laser-focus on one that is run by Catholic religious sisters and provides free care to terminally ill cancer patients.
That says a lot about their priorities.
[Featured image via EWTN screenshot]
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Comments
The state law explicitly exempts only the Christian Scientists from the requirement.
Well, THAT seems like an establishment, if anything does.
No, it isn’t. Christian Scientists don’t believe in medical care other than prayer, so everything they provide is religious services, and thus exempt from such laws. Whereas the nuns, in addition to religious services, are also providing medical and other secular services.
Now to them, the provision of those services is a religious act. They do it because they believe Jesus wants them to, but to the patients who receive those services they are not religious in nature. For a nun, changing a bedpan is an act of worship; but for the patient it’s just a bedpan being changed. The patient isn’t worshiping. So the law doesn’t provide an exemption.
What the nuns are saying in their lawsuit is that since for them service is worship, the law is telling them they may not serve Jesus in this way, since it’s impossible for them to do so while complying with the law’s demands. So it’s infringing their free exercise of religion, regardless of how the patients see it.
They’re right, of course. But this is what explains the distinction the law makes. It’s not that the lawmakers were biased in favor of Christian Science.
If CS types don’t believe in medical care then how can they provide it? A quick look at Wackipedia suggests they simply don’t offer those services, and consider the material world to be illusory.
While I’m not RC, nuns as medical carers would mean medical care in conformity to RC teaching, meaning NY can either get nuns providing care in defiance of the law, or nuns ceasing to provide care, but they cannot get nuns defying RC doctrine and providing care – they’d cease to be nuns etc. For NY to expect otherwise is pure bigotry and violation of 1A.
They don’t provide secular medical care. That’s why they’re exempt from this law.
The nuns are also exempt from this law for the religious services they provide. If they have a priest come to celebrate mass, they’re free to segregate that as their religion dictates. But this is about the secular services they provide, which the law doesn’t exempt, even though the only reason they provide them is religious.
And you’re 100% right about the choice NY has. NY has chosen to do without the nuns’ services rather than allow them to provide their much-needed services in a way that offends the left, even though not a single patient has ever filed a complaint.
The democrats probably just want to steal their votes (the elderly) and that is probably harder if there are nuns fluttering around their intended targets. I suppose that’s marginally better than Cumo’s attempt to kill them off during COVID.
I think that is true to some degree, but there is also an element of the nuns providing service while being loyal to a power higher than the State (meaning governmental authority in general, not necessarily New York state). Judeo-Christian beliefs embrace a power higher than the temporal State, which the Left abhors because they want us all to effectively worship and be obedient the state, which they, of course, will dominate and run. Interestingly, the Democrats have largely aligned themselves with Muslims, the point being that Islam combines both temporal and spiritual authority, so there is no conflict with the Democrats in that regard. However, I suspect they both think they are using the other party. Should they ever gain total power, one will eliminate the other, just as Stalin effectively eliminated nearly all the “Old Bolsheviks” who worked with him in the pre-Bolshevik coup and early Soviet Government periods. And I suspect it will be the Muslims who oust the Democrats, or as they are increasingly describing themselves, the Democratic Socialists.
“The state law explicitly exempts only the Christian Scientists from the requirement.”
Oh… I’m no lawyer but I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to go well for the Witch of Albany.
It’s become quite the litmus test on the looney left. You can’t be a card carrying democrat unless you’ve oppressed a Catholic order of nuns.
I wanted to be a Christian Scientist once but I wasn’t able to get into grad school.
Did you get nailed on the Boards?
😁
Terminally ill need so much care and to deny that care is insane
And the nuns are not denying it, in any way.
We need an armed vigilante group, “Nuns Against The Machine.”
The Catholic nuns provide their care entirely for free, while Christian Science facilities operate as commercial enterprises and charge substantial fees:
1. The Catholic Sisters do not accept money from patients, their families, or private insurance companies. They even refuse federal funding, Medicaid and Medicare reimbursements.
2. Christian Scientists charge hundreds of dollars per day for room, board, and physical “nursing arts” care. They aggressively bill private insurance and have successfully lobbied the federal government to pay Medicare Part A
New York is cracking down on a 100% free, charity-driven Catholic facility that exists solely to serve poor, terminally ill cancer patients.
Meanwhile, they’ve granted a legal loophole to commercial Christian Science facilities which generate revenue, charge insurance companies & collect Medicare dollars.
Maybe free nun run care doesn’t provide the same tax benefits as Christian Scientist, which is neither Christian nor scientific, enterprises?
The nuns don’t donate to the right campaigns.
An important point not made in this post, is that there have been no complaints about the nuns. It’s not as if any patient has been denied something and complained about it. The patients are all perfectly happy with the way the nuns are running things, and the only one making trouble is the state.
Excellent point.
If denied the care they need, these terminally ill patients will die!
The Left just loves screwing with the nuns. Obama administration did the same.
Some people (Democrats, haters, naysayerps) need to get a life. Let the nuns be nuns. Good Lord.
enough of the alphabet people / trans-impaired retards.–the nuns are providing palliative care to patients facing imminent death–patients are there voluntarily–there are no rehabilitation / therapeutic imperatives — services are given free of charge–the nuns perform their services out of duty / moral obligation / the tenets of their faith–in other words, out of grace
that grace should be somehow qualified / regulated and meted out based on the feelings and perceptions of a bunch of retards is absurd
tell the retards if they’re unhappy with how the nuns provide services or to whom, then go die somewhere else
Given the RFRA litigation nuns have filed and won with the contraception issue, and the idiocy of New York and its COVID/nursing home disaster, that they would tread far more carefully. But….it is New York’s state government and they are morons…