Colorado federal court rebuffs anti-Catholic directive denying preschool education

St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton v. Roy is another win, albeit a narrow one, for religious freedom in education. Administrators in two Catholic preschools, along with parishioner-parents of two children attending St. Mary preschool (and a one-year-old they will enroll when she is old enough), successfully challenged officials for excluding them from Colorado’s universal preschool program.

The program was adopted in 2022 but is in its first full year of operation. It uses a combination of public and private funds to provide fifteen hours of free preschool per week for qualified children regardless of their races, ethnicities, religious affiliations, sexual orientations, gender identities, lack of housing, income levels, or disabilities of those of their families. The program covers almost 40,000 youngsters, or about 60 percent of Colorado’s eligible four-year-olds, including forty-faith-based preschools caring for more than 900 children.

This brief essay highlights key points in a federal trial court judge’s 101-page opinion in St. Mary before reflecting on its significance.

Controversy arose after officials excluded the two Catholic preschools because administrators asked families to share their beliefs.

The judge found that while public officials generally operated the program equitably, they violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion. The judge conceded that although officials had “discretionary exemptions” in applying the law’s equal educational opportunity requirement, they failed to enforce it in a neutral or generally applicable manner.

The judge decided that officials violated the plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights absent a compelling governmental interest in excluding the schools and parents from the program because they granted exceptions to other faith-based preschools that limited enrollment to members of their own congregations.

Still, the judge rejected the plaintiffs’ Establishment Clause claim rooted in the Supreme Court’s 2022 judgment in Carson v. Makin requiring officials to permit parents living in districts lacking secondary schools to send their children to faith-based schools under Maine’s tuition assistance program. The judge dismissed the claim because the facts in Makin were sufficiently different than those in St. Mary. Additionally, he summarily rejected their free speech claim as lacking merit.

The judge did grant the plaintiffs’ request for a declaratory judgment that officials’ uneven application of the law violated their free exercise rights. The judge also permanently enjoined Colorado from requiring Catholic preschools to agree to enroll children regardless of their religious affiliations, as long as officials granted exceptions for other faith-based schools.

Finally, the judge awarded the plaintiffs one dollar in nominal damages.

As difficult as it is to make sense of the actions of Colorado state educational officials in St. Mary, this much is clear: they demonstrated an unmistakable antipathy, even overt hostility, toward the Catholic schools and parents. If anything, officials punished the schools and parents in a manner reminiscent of Patrick Buchanan’s often-cited quip that “anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.”

In matters of faith so important to so many, whatever happened to openness to diverse points of view espoused by many in today’s society? It seems that public officials in Colorado lost sight of the fact that the First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion applies equally to all Americans, including Catholics and other Christians, who should be able to live as they wish and not be penalized for their beliefs.

Also, even assuming that individuals and families who are not members of the Catholic faith are interested in the quality of educational programming being offered in these two preschools, why would they even consider sending their children to institutions whose values are clearly inconsistent with their own beliefs and lifestyles? Moreover, it is puzzling why Colorado officials applied the rules so inequitably to the different faith-based preschools in apparently advancing their own ideologies. This simply makes no sense unless the goals are indeed ideological.

The state of Colorado certainly does not have a stellar record in protecting religious freedom. In fact, the state’s Civil Rights Commission lost in two high-profile cases before the Supreme Court when its members tried to compel Christians to communicate messages inconsistent with their religious beliefs. One hopes the state will be more respectful in how its officials deal with people of faith and their institutions, including preschools.

In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Civil Rights Commission the Supreme Court held that because commission members displayed overt hostility to a Christian baker’s beliefs, they violated his right to the free exercise of religion in attempting to order him to make a cake for individuals entering a same-sex union.

Similarly, in 303 Creative v. Elenis, without addressing religion directly, the Court ruled that the Commission violated a Christian wedding website designer’s free speech rights in seeking to compel her to provide her professional services to a same-sex couple because this would have required her to communicate a message inconsistent with her faith.

Will Colorado officials learn from their mistakes by respecting the religious rights of Christians by treating them equally? Hope springs eternal!