DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: SCOTUS takes up pre-K religious discrimination case against Colorado.
One consequence of Colorado’s lurch to the political left has been the adoption of massive new state and regulatory programs. (This has led, predictably enough, to large budget deficits and neglect of core government services). Among the new programs is one that enables residents, including undocumented immigrants, to send children to pre-kindergarten (pre-K) schools at taxpayer expense.
However, Roman Catholic pre-K schools found themselves excluded from participating because the law mandated that “each preschool provider provide … an equal opportunity to enroll and receive preschool services regardless of … sexual orientation [or] gender identity.”
Of course, requiring acceptance of non-binary gender ideology directly contradicts most traditional religious teachings, including Catholic doctrine. Moreover, at the pre-school level, one might suspect that gender dysphoria is more likely the product of adult mismanagement than the child’s real proclivities.
As if this were not enough, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, which administers the pre-school program, adopted regulations permitting schools to discriminate in ways favored by “woke” ideology. For example, they are permitted to give preferential treatment to certain racial groups and, in the phrase of the program director, “the LGBTQ community.” The program director justified this by saying that the beneficiaries of this treatment were groups that, in America, historically faced discrimination.
Stay tuned…
