Last month the US Supreme Court agreed to hear St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, a case that almost writes its own headline: Universal for me, but not for thee.
Colorado created a “universal” preschool program, promising every family in the state free preschool at the school of their choice, public or private.
Then it barred Catholic schools from participating unless they agreed to abandon admissions practices rooted in their faith.
The state’s rationale: Catholic preschools, as a matter of sincere religious conviction, reserve the right to limit admissions to families who support Catholic teaching, including those regarding biological sex and marriage — and Colorado insists that any school accepting state funds may not.
Universal means everyone — unless you’re a Catholic school that won’t check your theology at the door.
Legally, this is not a close call.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly made clear that the government cannot exclude people from public benefits because of their religious beliefs or exercise — in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022).
Colorado ignored that clear precedent, which is no surprise.
Since 2018, Colorado has been on the losing side of three major Supreme Court decisions that dealt with free exercise or free speech grounded in religious belief — and St. Mary may well make four.
Let’s walk through the wreckage.
In 2018, the justices ruled 7-2 that Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission had treated cake artist Jack Phillips with open hostility toward his religious beliefs.
Their message in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission was unmistakable: You cannot treat one set of religious beliefs as legitimate and another as worthy of contempt.
Colorado’s response was to keep wielding the same discredited weapon.
The state tried to force Christian graphic designer Lorie Smith to create websites celebrating same-sex weddings.
That earned it a second rebuke from the high court in 2023’s 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, a 6-3 ruling that cited a long line of precedents prohibiting compelled speech and viewpoint discrimination.
A preschooler like those at St. Mary’s would learn after two run-ins with a hot stove to keep his distance, but Colorado, unfazed by its losses, didn’t change course.
It applied the state’s so-called “conversion therapy” ban to block Christian counselor Kaley Chiles from engaging in consensual talk therapy with patients who wanted to live consistently with their own moral beliefs about sexuality.
In March, in Chiles v. Salazar, the justices ruled 8-1 to strike down this textbook example of viewpoint discrimination, calling it an “egregious” assault on the First Amendment.
The pattern speaks for itself — Colorado refuses to shake the bias it displayed back in Masterpiece Cakeshop.
The state seems hell-bent on enforcing its own orthodoxy of thought, and the Supreme Court has had to come back time and time again to remind it that the First Amendment protects freedom of speech and freedom of religion even when the state disagrees with a person’s opinions.
Fortunately, the high court continues to faithfully apply the law — and not just the conservative justices.
In two of Colorado’s three First Amendment losses, two of the Democrat-appointed liberal justices joined the Republican appointees.
That’s a measure of just how indefensible the state’s position is.
So is this a sign the constitutional system working as intended, or is it a red flag about our vulnerability to recalcitrant government officials?
The answer is both.
On the one hand, Colorado refuses to learn from its mistakes and is inflicting real harm on its citizens in the process.
The damage is no mere abstraction: Two Catholic preschools have already had to close because of Colorado’s exclusion, and preschool enrollment across the Archdiocese of Denver has declined by about 20%.
Apparently, state-enforced orthodoxy takes precedence over the cause of truly “universal” preschool in the Centennial State.
At the same time, the high court deserves applause for taking on these cases and righting legal wrongs.
The Framers understood that some state governments would test constitutional limits — and that the answer was not to shrug and let the infringement stand.
Some may be frustrated by the court’s willingness to keep correcting Colorado.
But the real red flag is that correction keeps being necessary.
A state that responds to each Supreme Court defeat by searching for the next cake artist, web designer, therapist or Catholic school to target has not absorbed the lesson.
It has decided that constitutional compliance is optional when the politics cut the state’s way.
But it is not, and the justices should remind Colorado of that by ruling decisively for the plaintiff families when it decides St. Mary Catholic Parish.
Carrie Campbell Severino is president of JCN.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
