The state will provide preschool education only to children of parents who are happy to subject them to progressive ideology.
The state will provide preschool education only to children of parents who are happy to subject them to progressive ideology.
‘T rain up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” For many parents, Proverbs 22:6 offers powerful guidance as another school year begins. One group of Catholic parents in Colorado takes this directive to heart and wants to partner with Catholic preschools for the education and formation of their little ones. They are demanding that the state’s universal preschool program allow them to use the public benefit at their schools of choice. It shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the intolerant demands of progressive ideology are at issue.
Unfortunately, the advice from Proverbs can be used for sinister as well as beneficial purposes. In various states, and at a federal level under the Biden-Harris administration, children of all ages are being force-fed progressive doctrines — with especially disastrous results in the astonishing rise in the number of young women encouraged by their teachers to embrace the transgender craze and its “therapies.”
Some background: In 2022, Colorado established a universal preschool program to provide all preschoolers with 15 hours of free education per week at a private or public school of their parents’ choice in the year before kindergarten. Schools that wish to participate in UPK Colorado must agree to “provide eligible children an equal opportunity to enroll and receive services regardless of race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability, as such characteristics and circumstances apply to the child or the child’s family.”
Catholic schools run afoul of the state rules because they require parents to sign a statement that says they agree with the Catholic community’s beliefs on matters such as marriage, sexuality, and gender, and the schools enforce dress codes and the use of pronouns based on students’ sex at birth. Families that don’t conform to the beliefs are disenrolled.
In other words: We’ll provide preschool education only to children of parents who are happy to subject them to our ideology. If you won’t ditch your religious convictions and get with the progressive program, we won’t help your kids.
A statewide coalition of religious preschool providers, including the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver, sent a letter to state officials requesting that faith-based preschool providers be exempt from UPK Colorado’s “equal opportunity” mandate. They cited their (perfectly justified) fear that the mandate would undermine religious teaching on human sexuality and identity. Remember, we’re dealing with preschoolers here.
When officials denied these schools a religious exemption, the archdiocese directed the preschools under its authority not to participate in UPK Colorado and, along with two Catholic preschools and the parents of a preschool child, filed suit in federal court.
The suit asserted that by conditioning participation in UPK Colorado on compliance with this mandate, namely the sexual-orientation and gender-identity aspects of the requirement, Colorado excludes many parents from receiving a generally available public benefit in violation of their rights guaranteed by the free-exercise clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They are represented by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. A lower court ruled in favor of the state. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing the appeal.
I filed an amicus brief in the appeal on behalf of five Catholic parents from Colorado who want to send their children to Catholic preschools precisely because these schools operate consistent with Catholic teaching. Three of the amici parents are able to send their children to Catholic preschools, although doing so involves making many sacrifices. Two cannot afford the cost of the preschool program without access to the money available under UPK Colorado.
The lower court’s long and convoluted opinion is riddled with legal errors. Chief among them is the court’s reliance on the discredited framework set forth in the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith and its failure to apply recent Supreme Court decisions striking down discriminatory laws in school-choice cases.
The decision also reflects the ignorance and intolerance of progressive ideologues. For example, the court failed to condemn the state’s outrageously offensive comparison of Catholic preschools to segregation academies of the old South and its attempt to brand millennia-old religious beliefs as bigotry.
Astonishingly, the court also used the success of Catholic education to bolster the state’s claims, remarking that “if religious schools in fact provide the best academic experience, the state’s interest in removing discriminatory barriers for publicly funded preschool education is even more significant.” It’s worth noting that in a recent case also involving the State of Colorado, the Supreme Court rejected the assertion that the very “uniqueness” of the services of a wedding-website designer could justify the state’s attempt to conscript her voice to disseminate the government’s preferred message. Such a rule “would not respect the First Amendment; more nearly, it would spell its demise.”
But perhaps the best example of faulty reasoning is the trial court’s arrogant assertion that plaintiffs “miss, however, the irony in valuing choice for religious schools and their students — but not for LGBTQ+ children and families.” This is an unfair accusation. Catholic preschools in Colorado and amici families protest the exclusion of Catholic schools from participating in UPK Colorado because of these schools’ fidelity to Catholic teaching. Excluding Catholic preschools from UPK Colorado won’t affect the number of preschools already available to LGBTQ families, whereas excluding Catholic preschools takes options away from families who want to send their children to these preschools.
Once the state chose to adopt UPK Colorado, it could not exclude schools based on their religious exercise unless it met a very high burden. It has not done so, or even tried to. It will probably take months before Catholic preschools in Colorado are vindicated. In the meantime, families hoping to send their young children to those preschools will have to go without the tuition assistance that Colorado promised — and the protection that the First Amendment offers all Americans.