Rick Larsen Challenges Supreme Court Over Religious Exemptions in Preschools

Representative Rick Larsen just did what 180 of his Democratic colleagues should have done long ago: filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court defending the right of LGBTQ+ children to attend preschool without being expelled. The case, St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, asks the justices to carve out a religious exemption so religious preschools in Colorado can refuse to admit LGBTQ+ kids — or the children of LGBTQ+ parents — while still cashing public checks from the state's universal preschool program. This is where the so-called "religious liberty" argument lands in practice: public money in, children out.

The legal terrain

Larsen and more than 180 House and Senate Democrats are arguing that ad hoc exemptions would destabilize the federal nondiscrimination framework. That's the right frame — but the underlying play is structural. If religious institutions that contract with the state can pick and choose which children they'll serve, then every civil rights statute on the books becomes a suggestion rather than a rule. We have already watched this movie play out with the Masterpiece Cakeshop logic: one narrow exemption metastasizes into a license to discriminate dressed in First Amendment clothing.

The Colorado universal preschool program uses public funds. Institutions participating in it should be bound by public obligations. That is not a radical proposition — it is the baseline of how public contracting has functioned since the Civil Rights Act. The plaintiffs want it both ways: take taxpayer money, then cite faith to refuse service. The brief names that contradiction, and it is overdue.

The same playbook, scaled up

While we await the Court, Ecuador's National Assembly just demonstrated the endgame. On July 28, lawmakers voted 118-0, with 25 abstentions, to pass a reform law that explicitly bars single lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from adopting, layering onto an existing ban on adoption by same-sex couples. President Daniel Noboa signed off on August 13; the law took force August 14. Human Rights Watch documented the specifics: the statute describes parental support for gender-affirming medical care for a trans child as conduct that can justify stripping parents of their legal relationship with their children, with a pathway to declaring the child eligible for adoption if both parents lose authority.

Read that again. A law sold as "streamlining adoption" while rendering single queer adults legally invisible to the state and arming the government to remove trans kids from loving homes. The bill's own stated commitment to the best interests of the child contradicts its own provisions — which is precisely the point. "Best interests" is the fig leaf; bias is the operative text.

What this tells us

These two stories are not separate. They are the same legislative strategy in different jurisdictions: use ostensibly neutral administrative reforms — preschool contracting rules, adoption streamlining — as vehicles to embed discrimination. When the Supreme Court weighs St. Mary, it is not just ruling on Colorado preschools. It is deciding whether public funding can be leveraged to entrench exclusion. Ecuador shows what happens when legislatures get the green light: the discrimination does not stay narrow, and the "exemption" becomes a roadmap.

We should not pretend the outcome is predetermined. But we should name what is at stake with the precision it deserves. Theocrats and their legislative allies are testing how much of the civil rights architecture they can dismantle under cover of religious freedom and administrative efficiency. Larsen and the 180 Democrats drew a line in a legal brief. The rest of us need to draw it in the streets, at the ballot box, and in every statehouse that tries this next.