Education, Culture & the Family

Oklahoma officials join Supreme Court fight over religious liberty and school choice

July 21, 2026

Ray Carter

Oklahoma officials are weighing in on the side of religious liberty and school choice in a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 2022, Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood established a universal preschool program that pays for all preschoolers to receive 15 hours of free education per week at a private or public school of their parents’ choice in the year before kindergarten.

However, the state mandated that private schools essentially embrace transgenderism and same-sex relationships as a condition of participation.

St. Mary Catholic Parish in Littleton, Colorado, St. Bernadette Catholic Parish in Lakewood, Colorado, the Archdiocese of Denver, and a Catholic family have challenged Colorado’s regulations as an unconstitutional violation of their First Amendment rights in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy.

In September 2025, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Colorado could exclude Catholic preschools from its universal preschool program. The case is now on appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Numerous groups have filed amicus briefs in the case, siding with the petitioners, including officials from Oklahoma.

“In Oklahoma, we believe parents know what’s best for their kids, including what school fits their family’s faith,” said U.S. Sen. James Lankford, R-Oklahoma City. “Colorado decided Catholic preschools didn’t get the same shot as everyone else, just because of their beliefs. That’s not religious liberty, that’s discrimination.”

Lankford and U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, R-Mich., led 43 Members of Congress—35 representatives and eight senators—in filing an amicus brief in the case.

The brief urges the court to protect the constitutional rights of faith-based schools participating in school choice programs and warns that allowing the 10th Circuit’s decision to stand could undermine a tax credit scholarship program established under the Working Families Tax Cuts Act.

The congressional lawmakers’ brief notes Congress has enacted multiple laws, from the earliest days of the nation’s history to the present day, that allow private schools to receive taxpayer funds for services. Those laws include the Educational Choice for Children Act (ECCA), passed last year, which provides taxpayers with a means to fund scholarships for children to attend and receive services at public, private secular, or religious schools.

“If states like Colorado can attach nondiscrimination conditions to universal pre-school programs that effectively exclude religious schools from the benefit program without violating the Free Exercise Clause, then states can attach nondiscrimination conditions to ECCA participation to effectively exclude religious schools,” the congressional lawmakers’ brief noted. “Indeed, states like Vermont have already attached such conditions to ECCA participation.”

The brief stated that Colorado’s actions, if allowed to stand, would effectively gut the religious liberty of both families and the school providers who wish to serve them, and the effects could spread far beyond Colorado’s borders.

“The Free Exercise Clause prohibits government-driven religious discrimination,” the Lankford brief stated. “In Colorado, the government disapproved of Petitioners’ religion and excluded them from a public preschool program for which they otherwise qualified. Should Colorado’s end run around this Court’s Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence be allowed to stand, the tactics employed by that state will not end in Colorado preschools.”

A similar brief in support of the petitioners, filed by West Virginia Attorney General John B. McCuskey and joined by 21 of his state counterparts, including Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, makes similar arguments.

The attorneys general brief noted that one “would expect States who chose to fund preschool education to enlist help from wherever it might be found—religious institutions included,” but that Colorado “sees things differently.”

“After creating a universal preschool funding program, it barred Catholic-affiliated preschools from participating,” the attorneys general brief stated. “It decided that key tenets of Catholic theology—core beliefs on matters like marriage and biological sex—were discrimination. The Catholic preschools could receive funding only if they agreed to admit students and families that opposed these aspects of the Catholic faith. It didn’t matter to Colorado that ‘shared values’ are one of the benefits of faith-based preschools.”

Colorado officials’ actions violate the constitutional rights of that state’s citizens, the attorneys general argued, because Colorado “has unconstitutionally conditioned a benefit—participation in the universal pre-K program—on St. Mary’s willingness to violate its faith.”

“The First Amendment does not protect against overt and express religious discrimination alone,” the brief stated. “Government hostility towards religious institutions violates the Constitution even if the State employs a little subtlety in achieving its discriminatory aim.

“And make no mistake: Colorado violated St. Mary’s First Amendment rights,” the brief continued.

An amicus brief filed by the Conscience Project and several Catholic families highlighted the real-world harm done to families in Colorado as a result of that state government’s actions.

“Wealthy families may still be able to choose religious education despite Colorado’s exclusionary policy. But many families represented by amici cannot,” the Conscience Project brief stated. “Karina Ramirez explains that her family originally viewed Catholic education as ‘for rich people’ until financial assistance made it accessible. Jill Hall describes being unable to afford preschool for her younger child after previously benefiting from tuition assistance. Andy Abols explains that every dollar spent on preschool is money unavailable for the medical needs of his disabled daughter. Colorado’s policy therefore places substantial pressure on families to forgo religious education not because they no longer desire it, but because the State has excluded their chosen schools from equal participation.”

The Colorado case is similar to one in Oklahoma several years ago.

Under former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Joy Hofmeister, who was the Democratic gubernatorial nominee in Oklahoma’s 2022 elections, the Oklahoma Department of Education attempted to prohibit private schools from participating in a school-choice program unless they embraced same-sex relationships and other views contrary to their Christian faith.

In Oklahoma, the Lindsey Nicole Henry Scholarships for Students with Disabilities (LNH) program allows students to use state tax dollars to pay for private-school tuition. The program serves children with special needs who have an individualized education program (IEP), adoptive children, and foster children.

Under Hofmeister, the Oklahoma State Department of Education unilaterally rewrote LNH regulations to bar the participation of private schools that restricted student admission or staff employment to individuals who agreed with the associated church denomination’s teaching on marriage (one man and one woman only) or required employees to be members of a specific faith, such as the Catholic Church.

The revised regulations effectively required private religious schools that adhered to traditional Christian teaching to nonetheless hire atheists as teachers and/or abandon student-and-faculty code-of-conduct requirements regarding sexuality and marriage, or else forgo serving LNH students.

Hofmeister did not relent until the office of then-Attorney General Mike Hunter issued an official opinion on Dec. 3, 2020, which concluded that the Oklahoma State Department of Education’s LNH revisions were illegal.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy during the court’s October 2026 term.