The strings on Colorado's preschool check

Abram, later called Abraham, had just rescued a city its own king couldn't protect. Four raiding kings had carried off its goods and Abram's nephew Lot. Abram chased them with 318 men of his household and brought it all back. The city's king met him in a valley with an offer: give me the people, and keep the goods. The plunder was his by right, and he refused all of it for himself and told the king why.

On November 3, Election Day, the Supreme Court hears a case about a gift with terms attached. Colorado's voter-approved universal preschool pays for 15 hours a week, worth about $6,000 a year. Church preschools can take it too, if they agree to enroll families "regardless of" eight traits, including sexual orientation and gender identity. Dozens of religious preschools signed on. Two Catholic parishes near Denver asked to be exempt from those last two, and when the state said no, they sued and lost twice.

At St. Mary in Littleton, preschoolers sing "It is time to pray" before snack. Lisa and Dan Sheley have seven children, and the four in school all went through that preschool. They voted for the program because, as Lisa put it, "They titled it, 'Universal for All.'" At trial, Lisa put the family's loss at about $4,700 a year.

Abram's refusal doesn't touch what the parishes believe. It presses on their plan: the state's money without the state's terms, or "funding without strings attached," as UConn law professor Preston Green told Chalkbeat. Abram's answer suggests there's no such thing. Whoever writes the check can rewrite the terms, and even a win leaves the pen with the next legislature. The parishes can fairly answer that this is the Sheleys' own tax money, and Abram let his allies keep their share. Still, the story asks what a church will owe once it relies on the money. Mark has a scene that presses on both sides.

Mark 10:13-1413They were bringing to him little children, that he should touch them, but the disciples rebuked those who were bringing them.14But when Jesus saw it, he was moved with indignation, and said to them, "Allow the little children to come to me! Don't forbid them, for the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these.

Each side says it's the one keeping the door open. The state says its rule is so "catholic parents as well as same-sex parents" know "their children will not be turned away." Yet Becket counts more than 1,500 children at over 30 Catholic preschools left out of a program called universal. Lisa Sheley told CBS her school accepts "any student that is willing to follow our Catholic morals and beliefs." In some towns, educators told Chalkbeat, a same-sex couple has few other choices. In Mark, the people at the door were Jesus's own disciples.

Abram went home from the valley with Lot, his household, and nothing the king could point to later. The Court will decide who gets the check. It can't decide what the parishes want a king to be able to say about them, or what either side owes the child left at the door.