New Ways Ministry is the lead amicus on my Supreme Court brief with Professor Marci Hamilton. The case is St. Mary Catholic Parish v. Roy, where some Catholic schools want to block LGBTQ students and families from their schools and yet claim they are entitled to receive state funding while they discriminate. The Colorado law says the preschools can receive money as long as they do not discriminate based on “race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, gender identity, lack of housing, income level, or disability.” St. Mary’s wants to discriminate yet receive the money while violating the state program’s rules.
Imagine if a school said: “We will not admit Black students because our religion says they are inferior. So, Colorado, pay up, as you are not allowed to discriminate against our racist religion.” The courts would not accept that. In the same way, they should not conclude a state must pay a school that plans to discriminate against all LGBTQ individuals.
This is a case that will be heard at the Supreme Court on November 3. Our brief points out that the First Amendment does not and should not create a society where religions get paid while breaking all the laws everyone else obeys. Instead, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly explained, everyone must obey neutral laws of general applicability. Colorado’s law is a neutral law about equality that applies to everyone. White schools cannot get paid for discriminating against Blacks. Catholics cannot get paid for blocking all LGBTQ people from their schools. If the schools win this case, the nation will move toward lawlessness, telling everyone that the government will pay you whenever you discriminate or break any other law.
Our amici in this case believe that religious freedom should not mean every religious person can violate all the laws they do not like. Instead, they understand everyone’s rights are protected if all of us are required to obey the laws. In our podcast discussion with two New Ways Ministry leaders, Sr. Jeannine Gramick and Francis DeBernardo, they say they learned that when religious leaders choose as a matter of conscience to disobey the law, they know they will be sanctioned for it. They never heard that religious freedom means whenever you break the law, the state pays you in thanks for your discrimination. That should never be the law of the United States.
I was confident New Ways Ministry would be an amicus in this case. “New Ways Ministry is a Catholic outreach that educates and advocates for equity, inclusion, and justice for LGBTQ+ persons.” I have known the people at New Ways Ministry for a long time. They have advocated for LGBTQ rights in the Catholic Church since 1977. I know them because I have studied Catholicism and its ethics for decades. I am a 1978 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where I majored in theology. Then I did my Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Yale University, where I wrote my dissertation on papal documents.
My dissertation advisor at Yale was Sister Margaret Farley, a Roman Catholic nun who had long supported women’s rights in the church. She is Gilbert L. Stark Professor Emerita of Christian Ethics at Yale University Divinity School. In the 1970s and 1980s, Farley and other theologians wrote articles arguing that there was room in the church for LGBTQ relationships and that those relationships could be moral choices. Although it has been too often ignored in contemporary conversations, the pro-gay discussion was underway among the people of the church in those years.
After I finished my Ph.D., I returned to Notre Dame as a theology professor. Every Notre Dame undergraduate must take two courses in theology, so I met a lot of undergraduates in those required courses.
I assigned parts of Farley’s and other theologians’ writings in support of LGBTQ rights. In response, several students, including gay students, visited my office hours. They said they were happy because they had never read or heard anything positive about gay rights until then. I have never forgotten how moved they were to find something pro-LGBTQ in the church. I was also saddened by how negatively they had been treated in many segments of their lives.
I have never forgotten their stories of discrimination. I tell people that I learned to support gay rights at the University of Notre Dame.
Because of these assignments and the reactions of my students, I learned about New Ways Ministry and how much they support LGBTQ rights, then and now. On our podcast about the case, Gramick told us that her religious congregation, the Sisters of Loretto, founded a school in Colorado, with a preschool, named St. Mary’s Academy. She says her school admits LGBTQ students and would never discriminate against them. Unfortunately, her school has the same name as the Petitioner in our case, St. Mary Catholic Parish. Gramick says she has gotten numerous complaints from people who read that St. Mary’s discriminates against gays and lesbians. She says no, loudly. Her school, like several other Catholic schools in Colorado, welcomes everyone, as she says Catholics should.
Like New Ways Ministry, the other amici in our case understand that real religious freedom means everyone obeys the law and supports LGBTQ rights. Miguel Díaz is the former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, who has written: “Confronting and accepting one’s queer humanity in the midst of strong opposition from familial, cultural, and religious influences can be quite daunting and for some life-threatening.” Fordham Professor and Father Bryan Massingale has long opposed racism and supported gay rights in the church. He recently received the John Courtney Murray Award from the Catholic Theological Society of America in recognition of his decades of scholarship on justice within the church. He writes: “Because somewhere, somehow, someday, a queer person, a gay man, a lesbian woman, a nonbinary individual…will hear…‘You belong. You have a place. You have worth. You have value.’”
Our other amici join them in inclusion for everyone. WATER is the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics, and Ritual. WOC is the Women’s Ordination Conference. The Quixote Center and Call to Action work vigorously to support human rights. Our amici have supported justice for everyone everywhere for many years. As a recent Vatican Study Group for a Synodal Church concluded, “Particular attention must be paid to those ‘who are most vulnerable, or those who are “out of the game” or “outside the box,” with a view to gathering their unique experiences (including…people with same-sex attractions…).’”
On September 15, 2026, the day our podcast on this case is released, I will be in Fremont, Ohio, visiting Sister Margaret Farley. She is now 91 years old. I will carry a copy of our brief to her. I am grateful that she taught me when I was young, in the spirit of the people of the church, what our amici are reminding you in our brief. Everyone must obey the antidiscrimination laws, because that is the only way to end the horrors of LGBTQ discrimination and to do justice to everyone. The Petitioners’ Colorado schools must learn that, too.