The house editorial opened with this:

This is getting old. Three times in the past decade the Supreme Court has vindicated religious schools excluded from state programs. Colorado still needs a remedial lesson.

The latest misbehavior is the State’s—through those State judges who think they’re above Federal law—position that Supreme Court rulings don’t apply to it, or them.  The state’s “universal” pre-K plan lets religious schools participate only if they agree to enroll families who oppose them on sex and gender.

The Supreme Court has an opportunity to deliver that lesson via St Mary Catholic Parish v Roy. Colorado’s pre-school program

pays for 15 hours of preschool a week, about $6,300 a year. Providers are subject to what the state calls “equal-opportunity requirements,” including enrollment without regard to religious affiliation, gender identity or sexual orientation. Two Catholic parishes, two parents, and the Denver archdiocese argue they’re being denied funds “solely on account of their religious exercise.”

Colorado’s argument that

it doesn’t target religion explicitly. Its program has included “more than forty faith-based providers,” and schools “may continue to teach and shape their curricula according to their faith.”

Nonsense. It doesn’t matter that the State is applying its demand for religious State-defined neutrality to all belief systems: it’s applying that demand and denying each of those systems, Catholicism in the present case, their right to select their students based on adherence to their religious strictures.

It’s time the Court reinforced the lesson with several sharp raps on the State judges’ knuckles with a ruler.