Colorado’s preschool case is not just about religion. It is about who gets to write the rules for public money.

I was raised on the idea that America is a bargain you can read: the docket is public, the rules are supposed to be legible, and power is supposed to have footnotes.

So when the Supreme Court takes a case about preschool, I do not hear finger paints. I hear the click of a lock. In 2026, preschool is not just childcare. It is a public benefit and an early test of whether “universal” means what it says on the brochure.

What the Supreme Court just agreed to hear

On Monday, April 20, the Supreme Court granted review in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, a dispute over whether Catholic preschools can participate in Colorado’s state-funded universal preschool program while keeping admissions policies Colorado says violate the program’s nondiscrimination requirements. The Court granted certiorari limited to Questions 1 and 2, meaning the justices are taking a slice of the fight, not the whole cake. And according to reporting on the case, the Court is not using this grant to revisit the 1990 free-exercise precedent Employment Division v. Smith.

The core dispute, in plain English

Colorado has a universal pre-K program created by a 2020 ballot measure. The program helps pay for preschool and includes public and private providers, including faith-based ones. But it comes with an equal-opportunity condition: if you take the funding, you cannot turn families away on protected grounds like sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Catholic plaintiffs say the state is effectively excluding them because their faith-based policies on marriage, sex, and gender shape who they will enroll. Colorado’s answer is essentially: believe what you believe, teach what you teach, but do not take public money to run a publicly subsidized admissions gate that excludes certain families.

Lower courts sided with Colorado. Now the Supreme Court wants a look.

The Paine test: who holds the lever?

In a universal program, the lever is access. If Colorado must fund providers that can exclude some families while taking state money, that is a new kind of publicly backed power: a taxpayer subsidy paired with a private veto over who counts as an acceptable family in the publicly financed system.

But if the state writes rules that functionally force religious providers to become secular in lived operations, that lever cuts the other way. Government does not need to padlock a church if it can regulate participation in public life until faith becomes a museum piece.

The liberty ledger and the tradeoff

• If the preschools win outright: religious providers gain freedom to align admissions with doctrine while receiving public funds. Families headed by same-sex couples, or families with a trans parent, risk being told their taxes support a benefit they cannot use at that provider.
• If Colorado wins outright: families gain a clearer guarantee that a publicly funded seat is not conditioned on who they are. Religious providers remain free to operate privately, but must forgo a subsidy in a market where the subsidy changes what survival looks like.

The Orwell check: mind the euphemisms

Two translation tricks are doing weightlifting here: calling a nondiscrimination condition “anti-Catholic,” and calling a request that may change who the program is for an “accommodation.” The Court’s job is to strip the language down to the studs and decide what is being built.

One question for the comments: if your tax dollars pay for a universal benefit, what is the fairest rule for who gets to say no at the door?