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In my personal experiences with conversion therapy as a late adolescent, one of the fundamental harms that I encountered was the demand that I must either choose a religious identity or an LGBTQ+ identity, a framing that prevented a healthy integration of my faith and personhood for many years. A case that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear will likely deepen a troubling legal precedent that establishes religious identity and LGBTQ+ identity as oppositional and perhaps even irreconcilable, a profoundly misguided approach that can lead to LGBTQ+ students being discriminated against and disproportionately harmed in publicly funded school systems.
Since at least the 2018 decision in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, involving a Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple, the U.S. Supreme Court has implicitly embraced the view that religious identity and LGBTQ+ identity are incompatible. When religious groups claim that LGBTQ+ inclusion is anathema to their values, the rights of the religious group must prevail over those of LGBTQ+ people. Next year, in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, the Court may more explicitly give Constitutional protection to faith-based discrimination against LGBTQ+ students in religious schools.
The St. Mary case concerns Colorado’s Universal Preschool Program (UPK), enacted in 2022, which provides every child in the state with up to fifteen hours of tuition-free preschool per week during their year before kindergarten through state funding grants to schools. Though these funds can be used for private religious education, the program prohibits eligible schools from excluding students and families based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
In 2023, St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado sought—and was denied—a religious exception to this requirement for its preschool. St. Mary appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the non-discrimination requirements of Colorado’s UPK forced the school to abandon its religious beliefs regarding sexuality and, therefore, violated their First Amendment rights to religious freedom. The Court agreed to hear the case, in keeping with their eagerness to weigh religious freedom arguments in recent years.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, counsel for St. Mary, argues on its website that the school’s First Amendment religious freedom protections have been violated. Moreover, the firm argues that Colorado’s LGBTQ+ inclusive non-discrimination rules threaten the ability for “religious schools to maintain their religious identity.”
But St. Mary is just one installment in a series of recent legal efforts designed to retrench conservative norms on gender and sexual identity in the law. In the 2025 case Mahmoud v. Taylor, religious parents gained the right to receive notice and then opt their children out of LGBTQ+-inclusive lessons in public schools across the country. Also in 2025, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law restricting medical treatment for transgender minors.
Undergirding St. Mary is a polarizing viewpoint that frames religious identity and LGBTQ+ identity as at odds with one another. In some parts of the world, such views have led to the stark criminalization of homosexuality with the death penalty sometimes imposed.
Certainly, religious and LGBTQ+ identities can be viewed as incompatible, especially when those religious views are upheld by the law. Such views include the idea that homosexuality is a sin and the notion that transgender identities are a perversion of the natural order. St. Mary is fundamentally about a clash of worldviews: one that seeks to protect LGBTQ+ students and families against faith-based discrimination and one that relies upon religion to justify discrimination.
St. Mary makes the very meaning of the term “discrimination” central to the case. One person’s experience of discrimination based on LGBTQ+ identity is pitted against another’s defense of their religious identity, according to the Becket Fund, which argues that if Colorado’s UPK program violates religious conscience, it is a form of discrimination against religious families.
But education law expert Kevin Welner has drawn attention to how taxpayer-funded public schools must comply with anti-discrimination laws, whereas taxpayer-funded private religious schools are largely exempt from complying with those laws. To get around anti-discrimination regulations, Welner shows how lawmakers are essentially “outsourcing discrimination” against LGBTQ+ students to private educational contractors. If St. Mary Catholic Parish prevails, such outsourcing of discrimination will become more accessible nationwide.
The St. Mary litigation advances a troublesome blurring of public and private, as well as the larger religious and political vision of privatizing education on the public’s dime. And a Supreme Court victory for the parish, which is the anticipated outcome, will usher in an era of religiously motivated, taxpayer-funded, and Constitutionally protected discrimination against students.
St. Mary and recent cases connecting religious identity, LGBTQ+ identity, and schools are about the norms that the majority of Justices on the Court view as under threat by LGBTQ+ visibility. If, as some claim, marriage equality cannot realistically be rolled back, today’s Court seems to be doing everything in its power to cement discriminatory norms in other spheres, especially in education.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, Justice Samuel Alito directly expressed his concern with the upending of traditional norms regarding sexuality and gender. His majority opinion referred to LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum as a threat to these norms—those that maintain LGBTQ+ invisibility. Justice Alito wrote: “The [LGBTQ+-inclusive] books are unmistakably normative. They are designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.” The plaintiffs in Mahmoud were religious and the subtext of Justice Alito’s concern is undeniably religious in nature.
Yet, even as the Court’s conservative justices are pushing as diligently as possible to roll back gains made for LGBTQ+ visibility in schools and to frame LGBTQ+ identity and religious identity as oppositional, we should all remember that this is not a new strategy.
In her book White Evangelical Racism, religion and politics expert Anthea Butler describes how religious freedom arguments also undergirded racist resistance to school integration. Butler notes that in the decades following the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, some evangelical Christians “began to use the language of ‘religious freedom’ . . . to exclude LGBTQ persons from civil rights.”
The conservative majority on today’s Supreme Court wields religious freedom to explicitly discriminate against LGBTQ+ students and families rather than a shield to protect the religious liberties of all people, including LGBTQ+ folks.
Let’s not forget that LGBTQ+ students of faith and their families do exist—if only their religious freedoms were fought for as fiercely. But the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty and the aligned Justices have bought into the anti-democratic notion that religious identity and LGBTQ+ identity are incompatible.
Alarmingly, as Constitutional law expert Andrew Koppelman has warned, our nation’s cherished right of religious freedom has increasingly turned toward religious privilege, as the Supreme Court has in recent years placed “religion in such a privileged position that any exemption [for religious people or institutions] at all can be justified.”
Today’s so-called religious freedom movement often positions LGBTQ+ identity as a threat to religious identity. These contemporary activists for religious privilege amplify public rhetoric that pits religion against LGBTQ+ people and vice versa.
This nation’s founders were explicitly wary of faith-based harm. They tried to craft a Constitution that would help us avoid the mistakes of centuries of religious warfare. And their handiwork is being destroyed by the current Court.