The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear the case of St. Mary, a suburban Catholic parish, which has been excluded from the state’s pre-K program. St. Mary’s sin: holding fast to Catholic teaching.

Nobody who has followed the news is surprised that Colorado is doing this, and nobody will be surprised if Colorado loses at the high court, as it has done many times before.

Colorado lost at the Supreme Court when it tried, twice, to compel a cakemaker to violate his conscience. Colorado lost at the Supreme Court when it tried to force therapists to practice gender ideology.

What’s going on in Colorado?

The root problem is Colorado Democrats’ near-religious dedication to an extreme separation of church and state. This separation fundamentalism is not confined to Colorado but has achieved official status at the state level there.

They believe that anything touched by the state becomes a no-religion zone. Of course, they also constantly expand the reach of the state, thus constantly narrowing where religion is allowed.

Taken as a whole, Colorado’s project is one of driving religion into the catacombs.

No Catholics need apply

Colorado, in 2020, created a “universal pre-K” program, an item high on the wish list for progressives for the past few decades.

The program provides state funding for all parents to send their 3- and 4-year-olds to preschools, including daycare centers, public schools, private schools, and other privately run preschools. Colorado politicians and state officials assured religious institutions that they would be eligible for the money.

The key condition, state officials would explain after the bill became law, was that every program receiving state subsidy be an “equal opportunity” daycare, which would take in families “regardless of, inter alia, race, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, income level, or disability.”

St. Mary’s is a Catholic parish in Littleton, a suburb of Denver. St. Mary’s offers a preschool that is open to families of all faiths, races, incomes, immigration statuses, and backgrounds. But as a Catholic institution, St. Mary’s does not grant that a boy who identifies as a girl is therefore a girl. Also, the Catholic church teaches that marriage is between a man and a woman.

St. Mary’s never demanded that every family be Catholic or even Christian, but it does require that parents agree with the sort of education the school is providing.

Catholic teaching — this is lost on secular critics — holds that parents, not schools, are the primary educators of their children. Schools are the parents’ chief partners in this undertaking. Thus, when a Catholic school takes in a student, it is not contracting with the parents for the education of the child — it is partnering with the parents in the formation of a child.

This formation includes moral formation and, as one of its ends, helping a young man or woman discern his vocation, which in most cases is the vocation of marriage and parenthood.

A Catholic school cannot be a good partner with a parent who rejects that project of formation.

Thus, Colorado’s nondiscrimination rule effectively bars parents at Catholic pre-K from the taxpayer-funded “universal pre-K” program.

“Colorado created a universal preschool program that funds families to send children to the public or private preschool of their choice — but not the Archdiocese of Denver’s Catholic preschools,” as St. Mary’s put it in its petition to the Supreme Court.

Nondiscrimination is often held up as dogma by liberal Democratic politicians, but there are plenty of exceptions. Colorado, for instance, made it clear it would fund an all-black preschool, or a preschool only for “gender-nonconforming children.”

Explicitly, Colorado says a gay-parents-only preschool can get state funding.

But a preschool that follows Catholic teaching? That is unacceptable.

This is rank discrimination in the name of nondiscrimination. Discrimination against religion, particularly Christianity, is the modus operandi for Colorado’s government.

Bake me a cake

Jack Phillips is an observant Christian and a baker in Lakewood. The state government has repeatedly told him he must choose just one — he can’t be both in Colorado.

Colorado’s government has spent the last 14 years persecuting Phillips. The case that made Phillips and the Colorado Human Rights Commission famous stemmed from a 2012 visit.

A gay couple asked Phillips to make a specialty cake for their wedding. To Phillips, that would amount to participating in a ceremony. While he would sell anyone a cake, he refused to participate in a ceremony he found morally objectionable.

The couple sued Phillips, and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission ruled in their favor and ordered Phillips to undergo ideological training. Phillips appealed, and the state courts agreed with the commission. Phillips fought to the Supreme Court, and in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, he won a 7-2 ruling. Justices Stephen Breyer, nominated by former President Bill Clinton, and Elena Kagan, nominated by former President Barack Obama, agreed with the five conservative justices.

The court ruled that Colorado’s actions were clearly motivated by anti-religious animus.

Colorado’s government clearly didn’t think that was a problem, though, as it has continued to act on that animus ever since.

Colorado subsequently lost in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, in which the state tried to compel a graphic designer to express messages that violated her conscience.

Colorado also tried to ban “conversion therapy.” This is an old fight for the cultural Left, where it invokes the image of Bible-thumpers trying to give electric shocks to force their gay children to be straight. But now it basically means any emotional or psychological guidance that could be understood as questioning homosexual activity or identity.

The sudden rise of gender ideology has made the Left’s prohibition on “conversion therapy” even more awkward. If a boy wants to transition into being a girl through irreversible means such as surgery or cross-sex hormone injections, a therapist who questions this objectively harmful course of action would be guilty of “conversion therapy.”

Therapists sued, and last year, Colorado once again lost.

How does Colorado keep failing to understand?

The Constitution and the courts

The First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing any religion or outlawing one. It also guarantees the free exercise of religion. Freedom of religion is the first clause in the First Amendment, and so it is literally the very first right in the Bill of Rights.

Religion, that is, deserves special accommodation and special consideration, according to the Constitution.

The American Left sees it differently.

COLORADO’S PATTERN OF RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION

It believes that religion has less right than any other organization. This is why Maine allowed ideologically rigid secular private schools to get voucher money but barred all religious schools. It sees the public square as sacred and religion as profane.

It believes religion must be a fully private thing, hidden away. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) once said, “I do my religion on Sundays.” Obama replaced “free exercise of religion” with “freedom of worship.”

Religion, in this worldview, is demoted from the first of the rights to a second-class thing that is merely tolerated.

This is how to understand Colorado’s penchant for discriminating against religion: The liberals there believe Christians deserve it.