The Supreme Court has agreed to hear an appeal from St. Mary Catholic Parish, which may give protection to faith-based discrimination. Jonathon Sawyer looks at some of the implications in a piece for The Progressive.
The St. Mary case concerns Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program (UPK), enacted in 2022, which provides every child in the state with up to fifteen hours of tuition-free preschool per week during their year before kindergarten through state funding grants to schools. Though these funds can be used for private religious education, the program prohibits eligible schools from excluding students and families based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In 2023, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado sought—and was denied—a religious exception to this requirement for its preschool. St. Mary appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the non-discrimination requirements of Colorado’s UPK forced the school to abandon its religious beliefs regarding sexuality and, therefore, violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The Court agreed to hear the case, in keeping with their eagerness to weigh religious freedom arguments in recent years.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, counsel for St. Mary, argues on its website that the school’s First Amendment religious freedom protections have been violated. Moreover, the firm argues that Colorado’s LGBTQ+ inclusive non-discrimination rules threaten the ability for “religious schools to maintain their religious identity.”
But St. Mary is just one installment in a series of recent legal efforts designed to retrench conservative norms on gender and sexual identity in the law. In the 2025 case Mahmoud v. Taylor, religious parents gained the right to receive notice and then opt their children out of LGBTQ+-inclusive lessons in public schools across the country. Also in 2025, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law restricting medical treatment for transgender minors.
Undergirding St. Mary is a polarizing viewpoint that frames religious identity and LGBTQ+ identity as at odds with one another. In some parts of the world, such views have led to the stark criminalization of homosexuality with the death penalty sometimes imposed.
Certainly, religious and LGBTQ+ identities can be viewed as incompatible, especially when those religious views are upheld by the law. Such views include the idea that homosexuality is a sin and the notion that transgender identities are a perversion of the natural order. St. Mary is fundamentally about a clash of worldviews: one that seeks to protect LGBTQ+ students and families against faith-based discrimination and one that relies upon religion to justify discrimination.