A Colorado preschool case will be the Supreme Court’s latest to test boundaries of LGBTQ rights and religious freedom

Filed 2h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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The Supreme Court opens its term Oct. 5 with St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, a challenge to Colorado's Universal Preschool Program, which withholds funding from preschools that won't follow a nondiscrimination policy barring exclusion based on sexual orientation or gender identity. Two Catholic parishes and several parents argue the policy violates their First Amendment right to free religious exercise.

The case is Colorado's fifth Supreme Court appearance in a rights dispute touching LGBTQ protections since 1996's Romer v. Evans, which the state won. It has lost the last three: Masterpiece Cakeshop in 2018 on procedural grounds, 303 Creative in 2023 on free speech grounds, and Chiles v. Salazar in March 2026, where the Court ruled 8-1 that Colorado's conversion-therapy ban amounted to viewpoint discrimination without resolving the underlying First Amendment question.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Three losses in a row is not a losing streak anymore, it's a pattern, and patterns tend to tell you how the next game turns out. Colorado keeps showing up to defend the same kind of law and the Court keeps finding a new door to walk through instead of answering the question everyone actually asked. At some point you have to wonder if the state is the test case or just the designated opponent.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Circus Waltz · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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