Colorado Catholic Preschools Hate The Gays But Love State Funding. What's A Supreme Court To Do?
And the Catholic Church had been doing so well lately.
It’s a tale as old as Bob Jones University. Well, as old as Bob Jones University trying to convince the IRS to let them keep their tax exempt status while they banned interracial dating and marriage for their students, anyway.
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to take up a case from the Archdiocese of Denver and two Colorado Catholic preschools that want to be able to participate in UPK Colorado, the state’s Universal Pre-K program, but also refuse to admit kids who have LGBTQ+ parents. As anyone with sense might imagine, since the schools are funded by Colorado taxpayers of every religion, race, and sexual orientation, schools that participate in the program are not allowed to exclude enrollees on the basis of religion, race, or sexual orientation. It’s not that hard!
The schools and the Archdiocese claim that this amounts to discrimination against them for being Catholic. It’s not. What would be discrimination would be a school refusing to admit children from Catholic families — which, to be clear, it would very much not be allowed to do. Even if they think the Pope has been real mean to Donald Trump these past few weeks.
There have been three recent cases from virulent homophobes against the state’s various civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ individuals. It hasn’t been great. SCOTUS ruled against their ban on conversion therapy and in favor of a web designer and a cake designer who wished to only create wedding websites and wedding cakes for heterosexual couples. The plaintiff’s attorney brought these up as prime examples of why he thought the state would lose.
“After three losses in religious freedom cases at the Supreme Court, Colorado should know better,” Nick Reaves, an attorney with Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that states cannot exclude families from government benefits because of their faith. We’re confident the Court will say the same thing here and put a stop to Colorado’s no-Catholics-need-apply rules.”
No one is excluding families from government benefits because of their faith. No one has barred Catholic families from getting food stamps or unemployment. Rather, they are telling preschools that they can’t get taxpayer money if they want to discriminate against taxpayer children. There are many Catholic organizations these days that do not discriminate against LGBTQ+ individuals and their children, and frankly it would be very hard to make any kind of case that barring these children from preschool is, in any sense, consistent with Catholic doctrine.
Pope Leo XIV, while still unfortunately holding to the doctrine that homosexuality is a sin and saying that it is unlikely that the church will change their position on this in the near future, has welcomed LGBTQ+ Catholics (including several married couples) to the Vatican and has said that everyone should be welcome in the church and no one should be excluded. Additionally, a 2023-24 Pew Research poll found that 70 percent of Catholics believe gay people should be allowed to marry, which was not only a lot higher than the 49 percent of Protestants who share that belief, but also higher than the 68 percent of Americans as a whole who did.
It is absurd to expect Colorado families to pay taxes in order to fund schools that discriminate against their children. These schools are free to exist as private, parochial bigot schools. They are free, as repugnant as it is, to insist that the toddler children of gay parents are evil sinners who might somehow taint their sacred Fisher Price See ‘n’ Says and bar them from their classrooms. What they’re not free to do is to use everyone else’s money to do so. This isn’t hard!
“We value the role of all preschool providers in our state, including religious providers, and have consistently welcomed all providers into the UPK program, so long as all families — no matter who you love, who you are or how you worship — may also participate in any preschool receiving state taxpayer dollars,” Eric Maruyama, spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, said in a statement.
There has, unfortunately, been a recent and fairly hysterical backlash on the Right to same-sex marriage, adoption, surrogacy, IVF and, quite frankly, any kind of families and family planning beyond teenage virgin girls marrying older men and having as many babies as it is possible for them to have, regardless of their ability to care for them. They spent a few years pretending that they had overcome the whole “hating gay people” thing, then pretended that they didn’t hate gay people, only trans people, and now — I believe as a result of being cordoned off on Xitter, with almost zero exposure to normal people — they have fully returned to their roots.
Of course, it’s now a slightly awkward situation, what with all of the gay Republicans they invited into their tent, many of whom are either married with children or hope to be in the near future — Dave Rubin, George Santos, Ric Grenell, Jillian Michaels, Tim Miller, etc. etc.
Not to mention Brandon Straka, the #WalkAway guy who went around assuring LGBTQ+ people that it was safe to dive into the GOP pool for the last decade, who is currently spiraling into full-on denial.
Just this past weekend, conservatives were howling over a video of right-wing “influencer” Ryley Niemi walking up to a random gay couple while they were holding their baby and asking them to comment on what appears to be his personal theory that gay people are more likely to molest their children than are straight couples and subsequently getting hit in the head by said couple. There is, to be clear, literally zero evidence of this whatsoever.
They were also extremely upset about another video of two men joking about their baby saying “Mama,” because the straw-grasping must continue.
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I don’t think it’s likely that the Supreme Court will rule against Colorado in this case, as that would open the floodgates to any entity receiving taxpayer money to discriminate against protected classes. That could end poorly, and not just for LGBTQ+ people on the Left. If there’s no problem with these schools receiving taxpayer funds while discriminating against toddlers from LGTBQ+ families, then it would be hard to make a case that preschools can’t exclude people based on the color of their skin or their religious beliefs. Surely, as mentioned, these groups would not like it very much if toddlers from Catholic families were excluded from another school (and we wouldn’t like it either!).
The real threat, unfortunately, is this surge in anti-gay extremism on the Right, because we’ve got some truly poisoned minds out there right now, desperate for a thing to grab onto while the Trump ship is sinking. If anything is going to end poorly, that will.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
IF The Sleazy Six will turn on the money spigot for them...wait for the Satanic Temple to demand the same treatment!
Some years ago, Catholic Charities in DC shut down its foster care and public adoption program, rather than comply with the state’s antidiscrimination requirements regarding same-sex married couples. That might sound less hypocritical than the Denver archidiocese demanding the right to discriminate while taking government money. But no, the DC branch was effectively saying that it’s better for kids to have no parents than to have same-sex ones. (True, other adoption agencies picked up the slack, but still…) What the hell is wrong with these people? I once heard a conservative Catholic claim that gay couples seek adoption to teach the kids to be gay, as a long-term strategy to enable the world community of gays to have more available sex partners.
Here’s the thing - the Church can certain forbid its *members* from pursuing same-sex relationships, but it has no right deeming that to be wrong for the entire human race. Non-Catholic gay people are none of the Church’s fucking business.