Religious intolerance has spiked in Colorado lately. Rather than work to tamp down anti-religious bias, the state is doubling down on discrimination by proposing to illegally ban religious schools from the state’s new universal preschool (UPK) program.

The state’s plan is a bad idea anytime, but it is particularly troublesome given the recent rise of antisemitic protests and incidents across the state. A prime example occurred on the House floor during the legislature’s special session, where multiple Jewish legislators – on both sides of the political aisle – were yelled at, degraded and treated discriminatorily simply for being Jewish.

Sadly, Colorado is no stranger to anti-religious bias, which long predates the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks against Israel.

The state has a long legal history of having its laws and other government actions struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court for discriminating against religious people. There’s the well-known case of Jack Phillips, the Lakewood cake baker who was punished by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission after the commission directly berated his religious beliefs.

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There is also the 303 Creative case, where the Supreme Court focused on free speech rights (not even needing to go to the freedom of religion) to strike down state law that attempted to force a religious owner of a website development company to comply with government orders to create products that violated her sincerely held beliefs.

Earlier this year, a story was shared with me that involved a state evaluator accusing a Jewish early childhood center of “forced literacy” for handing out a printed prayer to parents participating in a holiday event during school time.

And, most recently, there’s the Darren Patterson Christian Academy case, where a U.S. District Court judge granted a preliminary injunction to stop the state from telling a religious school who they may and may not hire as teachers.

Clearly, Colorado needs to clean up its act when it comes to how the state views and treats people of faith. Though the government must indeed be religiously neutral, it may not – and must not – be anti-religion.

Yet rather than reverse course, it seems the state is doggedly determined to continue to walk down the same discriminatory path. A recent media report revealed the Colorado Department of Early Childhood – the department overseeing the UPK program – is considering adding regulations that would eliminate religious schools from the funding eligibility. This even though faith-based programs were already funded this school year.

Colorado is once again poised to have its anti-religious ideology slam into the reality of constitutional protections for faith-based institutions – and religious people.

Beside the fact that a program is hardly “universal” if it excludes options the state doesn’t prefer, if these regulations are finalized, they would be blatantly unconstitutional. A trio of U.S. Supreme Court cases – Carson v. Makin (2022), Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020), and Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Comer, (2017) – make it clear when a state chooses to fund private schools, it may not exclude religious schools from that funding. Again, being religiously neutral is not the same as being anti-religion.

The proposed regulations reportedly seek to ban religious instruction if a preschool wants to receive UPK funding going forward. The regulations would strip away funding from religious schools that were funded this year – and, in several cases, told they could keep on teaching the way they always have. Not only would the state be breaking a promise it made, but it would also be exerting unconstitutional pressure on religious schools by giving them a choice: speak about what you believe, and the current government funding you receive will be yanked away, or, comply with our edict to stop all religious talk and keep the money.

It’s always a bad time for the government to engage in religious discrimination. But now, when religious discrimination is heightened and even on display on the floor of the Colorado House, it would be a terrible time for yet another state department to push aside and discriminate against Coloradans solely based on their religion.

If the state believes the youngest Coloradans deserve a publicly-funded education, that right must extend to all children and all families, not just the ones who will comply with a government edict to forget their religion and check it at the door. Nothing could be more anti-American.

Kristi Burton Brown is executive vice president of Advance Colorado