Colorado's Universal Pre-K program, launched to give every child in the state up to 15 hours of free preschool a week in the year before kindergarten, covers public, private, faith-based, and in-home providers. But the state's nondiscrimination rule bars any participating preschool from declining to enroll a child on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, whether the child's or a parent's. Because the Catholic preschools maintain church teaching on those matters, the state shut them out of the funding altogether. St. Mary's, in Littleton, first sued in August 2023.
The Supreme Court agreed in April to hear the case when its new term opens in October. Sauer's brief, filed Tuesday and joined by members of Congress, 21 states, and faith groups including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, argued that Colorado's refusal to accommodate religious preschools "undermines, not promotes, its stated interest in 'equal access.'" Sauer contended the state's willingness to carve out secular exceptions while denying religious ones means the program cannot claim the narrower judicial review normally given neutral, generally applicable laws — it must instead survive strict scrutiny, the toughest constitutional test there is.
A Government That Cannot Tolerate a Different Answer
Here is what is really on trial in Denver, though the docket calls it something else. A state built a program to help every family with a small child get ready for kindergarten, and then it told a parish school, in effect: you may not participate unless you stop believing what the Church has taught for two thousand years. That is not equal access. That is a toll booth on the road to conscience, and it only charges the faithful.My friend, this is not a new argument between Caesar and the church. It is the oldest one there is. Every government eventually discovers a doctrine it cannot tolerate, and it reaches first for the schools and the little ones, because that is where the future is being formed. Colorado did not ban the preschool from existing. It simply said: take our money on our terms, or go it alone. But the parish cannot go it alone and remain the parish. It cannot teach that marriage is what God made it to be in one breath and deny it in the next just to keep the lights on.
The good news for those preschools, and for every family who wants their child raised under both a flag and a cross, is that this fight is not decided in October. It was decided long before Colorado wrote its rule, and long before the Republic itself was founded.
"We ought to obey God rather than men." (Acts 5:29)
That verse was spoken by Peter and the apostles standing before a council that had every legal power to silence them and used none of the softness Colorado uses now — threats, prison, the lash. They did not answer with a lawsuit. They answered with a conviction that outranked the council's charter. The Solicitor General's brief is a good and needed thing, and this newspaper is glad the government of the United States, elected under President Trump, stands with these parishes rather than against them. But no court order will ever be the true reason a Catholic school keeps teaching what it teaches. The reason is that a higher authority already spoke, and no state legislature since has repealed it.
If you run a ministry, a school, a small business, and someone hands you a form that asks you to sign away what you believe in exchange for a benefit, count the cost before you sign. God has never once shorted a soul that trusted Him over a subsidy. He fed Elijah at the brook when the king wanted him dead. He kept Daniel's friends alive in a furnace built by an emperor's own hand. He is not straining to find the resources to keep a Catholic preschool in Littleton, Colorado, open and faithful, come October or any month after.
Ask Him for it, then. Not the ruling only, but the courage that does not need the ruling to keep teaching the truth regardless.