Government · Statewide · CO · August 14, 2026
Supreme Court to Hear Case on Colorado's Exclusion of Catholic Preschools
What Alinsky tactic is being used
2 of the thirteen rules are in play here — campaigns rarely run just one.
Rule 4
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”
The whole fight runs on each side holding the other to its own written text. Colorado points to the provider agreement the preschools signed and to the equal-opportunity language the legislature wrote into the Early Childhood Act; Becket points at the state's own word 'universal' and at the accommodations the state did grant — including the congregation-preference carve-out the district court protected — to argue the rule is not generally applicable under Employment Division v. Smith. The Tenth Circuit resolved it on 30 September 2025 by reading both books of rules against the facts found in a three-day bench trial.
Counter-Rule 4 · Radical Integrity
Close the gap between stated values and actual practice before anyone else finds it. This tactic only works where the gap is real.
Before anyone outside your school reads your handbook, read it yourself: pull the current admissions and employment policies, the parent handbook, and any signed state agreement, and check line by line whether what is written is what is actually done. Where practice has drifted from the stated policy, take it to the board this month and fix one or the other in the minutes. A school whose paper and practice match cannot be caught by this tactic; a school with a gap will be.
Rule 9
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
The pressure here is not a prosecution but a withheld benefit — roughly $6,000 per child for 15 hours a week, and more than 1,500 children across the Denver archdiocese's preschools. The unpriced fear of losing that money is what pushes boards elsewhere to sign conditions they have never read, long before any state asks them to.
Counter-Rule 9 · Courageous Realism
Name the worst case out loud and cost it honestly. Fear of the unnamed is doing most of the work.
Cost the worst case in dollars before the ruling lands. Ask your business manager for one page: what share of the school or ministry budget comes from state-conditioned funds, how many families it covers, and what tuition would have to be if it stopped tomorrow. Then decide in writing, at a board meeting, which conditions you would accept and which you would walk away from — with the number in front of you rather than in your imagination.
Chapter 3 sets out the rules; Chapter 15 answers each of them in turn. This is that pairing applied to this story.
Know where you stand
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Facing this yourself? Ask. Describe what is happening and get what the book, Scripture, and the law of your state say, with the exact words to use. Your first one is free.