Supreme Court rules on coach’s right to pray at school games

 coach's right to pray at school gamesBob Unruh – A high-school football coach fired by his district for his brief, solitary prayers following his team’s football games has won his free speech fight at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The 6-3 ruling included multiple concurrences and a lone dissent filed by the three leftist judges on the bench.

Written for the majority by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the opinion  came in the case involving Joe Kennedy, who was dismissed by the Bremerton school district in Washington state over his prayers.

His case to the high court charged that Bremerton was “hostile” to his faith and prayers, which happened after the field had cleared after the end of games.

Kennedy had asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the school’s punishment and decisions by lower courts.

The court’s majority held, “The Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect an individual engaging in a personal religious observance from government reprisal: The Constitution neither mandates nor permits the government to suppress such religious expression.”

“No one questions that Mr. Kennedy seeks to engage in a sincerely motivated religious exercise involving giving ‘thanks through prayer’ briefly ‘on the playing field’ at the conclusion of each game he coaches,” the majority said. “The contested exercise here does not involve leading prayers with the team; the district disciplined Mr. Kennedy only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his students after three games in October 2015.

“In forbidding Mr. Kennedy’s brief prayer, the district’s challenged policies were neither neutral or generally applicable. By its own admission, the district sought to restrict Mr. Kennedy’s actions at least in party because of their religious character…”

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Kennedy lost his job when he knelt at midfield after games for a “quiet personal prayer.”

The district court refused his motion for an order that the district reinstate him, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed.

The district court then dismissed Kennedy’s case entirely and the appeals court followed suit.

Significantly, however, when the 9th Circuit refused to hear the case en banc, 11 judges dissented, arguing that the panel “applied a flawed understanding of the Establishment Clause that followed the now-abandoned Lemon precedent that had been used by the Supreme Court.”

The opinion explained, “When Mr. Kennedy uttered the three prayers that resulted in his suspension, he was not engaged in speech ‘ordinarily within the scope’ of his duties as a coach. He did not speak pursuant to government policy and was not seeking to convey a government-created message. He was not instructing players, discussing strategy, encouraging better on-field performance, or engaged in any other speech the district paid him to produce as a coach.”

It continued, “Simply put: Mr. Kennedy’s prayers did not ‘ow[e their] existence’ to Mr. Kennedy’s responsibilities as a public employee.”

The district had cited the defunct Lemon precedent in demanding that “Mr. Kennedy’s rights to religious exercise and free speech must yield to the district’s interest in avoiding an Establishment Clause violation…”

The so-called “Lemon” test involved looking at a law’s purposes, effects and potential for entanglement with religion, and eventually involved guesses about what a “reasonable observer” would think.

It was abandoned because of its “ahistorical approach to the Establishment Clause.”

SF Source WND Jun 2022

One thought on “Supreme Court rules on coach’s right to pray at school games

  1. It looks like SCOTUS wrongfully ruled in favor of religion again. A ‘reasonable observer’ would agree that the coach is individual and harmless in praying alone after a spectator sports event but then, to my personal observations, a reasonable observer wouldn’t take the time to question the validity of a school hosting a religious (e.g. spectator sport with Samson; KJV; Judges 16: 27) event on the public’s dime, question the exponentially rising rate of mass shootings since the 1980 FDA approval of a mind altering drug (e.g. MSG) as a food additive or question getting a dangerous vaccination for an almost harmless new virus in a contrived pandemic. Clearly, to me, if it was a simple matter of personal faith, the coach could have waited until he was somewhere else, and ‘off-the-clock,’ to thank God that no one got seriously injured or died under his watch? Obviously, to this ‘unreasonable observer,’ Joe Kennedy was promoting his faith on the school board’s time and the public’s dime.

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