Denver Archdiocese Sues For Right To Discriminate On Public Dime

If you're tracking the various lawsuits trying to remove the last few bricks from the wall between church and state, here's one more that should be on your radar.

Colorado launch a universal Pre-K, allowing eligible parents to send their littles to any preschool program they choose. Except that to participate, schools are required “to accept any applicant without regard to a student or family’s religion, sexual orientation, or gender identity.”

"Wait a second!" declared the Catholic Church. "That's discrimination against us!" So they sued for the right to collect taxpayer dollars while refusing admission to any children from LGBTQ families. 

This argument is a rehash of the same one being made in other cases. It argues that in order to exercise their First Amendment right to discriminate against certain groups, the Catholic Church preschools must be given taxpayer dollars to help fund their discriminatory practices. 

You might have thought that infringing on the First Amendment rights of these schools would involve, say, forcing them to close down entirely, telling the church that it may not operate discriminatory pre-schools, and that the First Amendment would be satisfied by simply leaving them alone and allowing them to practice discrimination privately. But no--the argument of the Carson decision is that if the state gives taxpayer money to other secular schools that are following the rules, they can't rule out religious schools just because they won't follow the same set of rules.

Justice Breyer called this one in his dissent on Carson,

What happens once ‘may’ becomes ‘must’? Does that transformation mean that a school district that pays for public schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to send their children to religious schools? Does it mean that school districts that give vouchers for use at charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education? What other social benefits are there the State’s provision of which means—under the majority’s interpretation of the Free Exercise Clause—that the State must pay parents for the religious equivalent of the secular benefit provided?

Some folks have been clear about this goal for years-- a Christian school system funded by taxpayers, either by demolishing the public system and replacing it with Christian schools, or by injecting Christianity into the public system, or some combination of the two.

The lawsuit was filed last August and the trial began last week in U.S. District court, one of several similar suits in the state. One principal of one of the schools involved in the suit described turning away a student from a same-sex couple because "school officials worried Catholic teachings would cause confusion and conflict in the family." It's language that reminds me of my friend who was turned away from enrolling her children in a Catholic elementary school because the officials thought that, as children from a "broken" home, they might not be a good fit.

Mr. Shearer, my Fourth Grade Sunday School teacher, had us all memorize the Great Commission. I keep looking at these Christian schools demanding the right to keep children out and collect taxpayer dollars for it and waiting for just one of them to realize that they've lost the plot. 

Oh, well. The case is being handled by senior judge John Kane, who was originally appointed by Jimmy Carter. We'll see what he comes up with.