Denver churches, prioritizing bigotry, continue lawsuit over free pre-K program
Two Catholic churches want taxpayer dollars while refusing to obey secular laws
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In April of 2022, Democrats in Colorado (with very little GOP support) passed a law establishing free pre-school across the state beginning in 2023. Children can now access half-day programs at no cost to their parents. The governor’s office said it would save families an average of $4,300 a year and give kids a head start in their education. It was just an incredible opportunity for families that might not have been able to afford such programs. (Since the $322 million program launched in August, it has helped 40,000 four-year-olds attend 1,900 participating schools, 40 of which are religious.)
In order to receive funding, schools had to follow some basic rules. For example, they couldn’t discriminate against students. They had to accept kids regardless of their (or their family’s) race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc.
That restriction led the Denver Catholic Archdiocese and two of its parishes to sue state officials. They wanted to receive taxpayer funding without giving up their bigotry.
Their argument was that Catholicism required them to reject students who have gay parents and staffers who are in same-sex relationships. They said they couldn’t recognize the existence of transgender people or even use their pronouns if they conflicted with whatever was written on a birth certificate. They wanted to ban students from wearing the “opposite sex’s uniform” or using what they deemed were the wrong bathrooms. They also wanted to prioritize the acceptance of kids from Catholic families over, say, Jewish ones, even though the law already permitted them to accept kids from their own parishes.
But it didn’t take a genius to understand the real goal here: This was always about Catholics’ ability to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
The lawsuit said enrolling children with gay parents into an Archdiocesan school “is likely to lead to intractable conflicts” because a “Catholic school cannot treat a same-sex couple as a family equivalent to the natural family without compromising its mission and Catholic identity.”
There was a simple solution to that, of course: Just don’t accept the state’s money.
No one was forcing the Catholic Church to participate in the program. If families wanted to send their kids to Bigot Factories, they had every right to do so, and no one was stopping them. The Archdiocese could just do everything it was doing before this law went into effect.
The Catholic Church knew this. Which is why they were also arguing that the new universal Pre-K program was bad for business. Because if pre-school was free elsewhere, why would anyone give them money? And if enrollment went down, they would have to charge their own members even more. Why didn’t state officials care about the Church’s bottom line, dammit?!
This is seriously what they wrote in the lawsuit:
By creating a program that provides “universal” funding for preschool programs, Colorado has cornered the market for preschool services.
Any providers who do not participate in the UPK program will be severely disadvantaged since they will be forced to charge significantly higher prices than the participating programs—both secular and religious—which aren’t religiously barred from participating in the UPK program.
A press release from the conservative legal group Becket added:
This ban forces parents to choose between paying out of pocket for the cost of faith-based preschool or receiving a free preschool education at any other private school in Colorado. It also hurts the ability of schools like St. Mary’s and St. Bernadette’s to compete with other preschools that can offer free preschool education.
In the marketplace of ideas, the Catholics were admitting they were losers—and that the neutral rules were so unfair to them, it was illegal.
Therefore, the rules needed to change. Not their beliefs. (Never their beliefs.)
This was the epitome of broken brain religion for you: A program that would lift up families that couldn’t afford early childhood education, and which could help students get a leg up on their formal schooling, was a problem for these Catholics because they prioritized their own bigotry over the needs of children.
It’s not that the Archdiocese wanted to end the program. They just wanted to have their cake and eat it too. They wanted to be able to discriminate against LGBTQ staffers and kids and families while still being eligible for government funding.
As I mentioned last week, when a similar predicament happened in Maine and religious schools demanded government funding that was part of a state-sponsored program, lawmakers responded by saying taxpayer money could go to religious schools as long as they didn’t discriminate. That led to most religious schools ditching the program entirely. That could be the response in this case, too. (In Maine, the bigoted religious groups have filed an appeal.)
It’s telling that there was nothing in the Archdiocese’s lawsuit about their right to reject divorced parents or anyone who’s had an abortion, because even though those things also violate Catholic doctrine, the Church has never really had a problem looking the other way on those “sins.” They have their own made-up sin hierarchy.
This past June, U.S. District Court of Colorado Judge John Kane ruled mostly in favor of the state. They weren’t discriminating against religious schools by saying all participants had to abide by the non-discrimination rules, he wrote. But it wasn’t a total win. By allowing Catholic schools to prioritize children in Catholic families over, say, Jewish families, the state had allowed a faith-based exemption to the law. So were faith-based exemptions allowed or not? The state “cannot have it both ways,” he wrote.
The Catholic schools called it a victory... but it wasn’t the complete victory they wanted. They had hoped the judge would declare the non-discrimination rules illegal. He didn’t. So they’re not done fighting this in court. They’re now appealing the decision.
(Even that may be moot. According to Chalkbeat Colorado, the state removed the non-discrimination rules altogether for the 2024-2025 school year. It seems like the state is willing to let a few Catholic schools be bigots with state money in order to make sure the program, with all its benefits, can keep going.)
The fact that this case remains in the courts, though, means there could be long term consequences that hurt families outside the rigid Catholic mold.
If the Catholic preschools win, it’s possible Colorado children could be shut out of some preschools because of their or their parents’ identities.
Brittany, the mother of a 7-year-old transgender girl, choked up as she talked about the lawsuit.
“It’s so upsetting that there’s so much hate for our kids,” she said. “These kids are just kids. They don’t have a political agenda.”
…
In a landmark 2022 Maine case called Carson v. Makin, the high court ruled that religious schools can’t be excluded from publicly funded programs if secular private schools are allowed to participate. But the court didn’t clearly address whether states could require those religious schools to agree to non-discrimination rules in order to participate.
“That then tees up this tension,” said Robert Kim, executive director of the Education Law Center. “The religious schools are arguing… ‘Having to abide by those non-discrimination policies violates our religious rights.’ ”
It seems obvious that the goal of challenging these rules is no longer about participating in the universal Pre-K program, but rather getting this case in front of the Supreme Court so that its conservative super-majority can use it to create yet another hole in the wall between church and state, perhaps by ruling that religious beliefs can always be a loophole for people who don’t want to follow the law even while receiving government benefits.
The irony is that no one was ever forcing the Catholic Church to do anything that violated its beliefs; the Archdiocese was just unhappy that everyone else was doing pretty damn well by rejecting their bigotry and they couldn’t handle being left behind.
(Portions of this article were published earlier)
"Their argument was that Catholicism required them to reject students who have gay parents and staffers who are in same-sex relationships.
Oh ? So explain how and why there is still non taxpayers funded catholic schools and colleges in France when we have mandatory pre-K and 5 levels of scholarships ?
‘Having to abide by those non-discrimination policies violates our religious rights.’"
Forcing your religion on taxpayers is violating THEIR religious and civil rights.
They've got a lot of nerve complaining that other businesses have an unfair advantage. Religious schools already start with advantages other businesses don't have. Tax incentives, lack of regulatory oversight and donations from members are all things a non-religious school would love to have. Claiming that the playing field won't be level until they also get tax payer money that they did not contribute to in the first place is just beyond belief.