Supreme Court to Hear Case of Catholic Preschool Excluded From Colorado Program Over State’s LGBTQ Policy

The Supreme Court in November will hear the case of a Catholic school excluded from Colorado’s universal preschool program over its views on LGBTQ issues.

On Tuesday, the high court released its calendar of arguments for November that includes the case of St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, scheduled for Nov. 3. The calendar also includes a case about whether an inmate can sue a prison official, an affirmative action lawsuit, and a death row case.

St. Mary’s Catholic Parish preschool in Littleton, Colorado, has argued its exclusion from the state’s universal preschool program violates the First Amendment’s protection against religious discrimination. The state requires schools to admit LGBTQ-identifying children and the children of LGBTQ-identifying parents.

A district court and the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Colorado, citing the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Division v. Smith that the state’s rules were neutral and applied to every preschool without distinction. In the 1990 precedent, the Supreme Court allowed Oregon to exclude a Native American man from receiving unemployment benefits because he had consumed the hallucinogen peyote, which he claimed was part of his religious practice.

Congress then passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which requires strict scrutiny for laws restricting religious freedom.

The plaintiffs in the case are two Catholic parishes, two Catholic parents, and the Catholic Archdiocese of Denver. The defendant is Lisa Roy, executive director of the Colorado Department of Early Childhood.

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Plaintiffs are citing the 2012 case of Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the 2025 case of Mahmoud v. Taylor. In the first case, the Supreme Court upheld the freedom of churches to hire and fire ministers; in the second case, the court’s preliminary injunction allowed parents to opt their children out of reading explicit school books with gender and sexual content.

Plaintiffs also note that two federal appeals courts and two state supreme courts have ruled differently from the 10th Circuit on the same question.

The state has argued in its response that the parish seeks “an exemption from this law to allow them to receive public funding while turning away preschoolers because of their, or their parents’, gender identity or sexual orientation.”