WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a football coach from Washington state who sought to kneel and pray on the field after games.
The court ruled 6-3 for the coach with the court’s conservative justices in the majority and its liberals in dissent. The justices said the coach’s prayer was protected by the First Amendment.
“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
The case forced the justices to wrestle with how to balance the religious and free speech rights of teachers and coaches with the rights of students not to feel pressured into participating in religious practices. The outcome could strengthen the acceptability of some religious practices in some other public school settings.
The decision is the latest in a line of Supreme Court rulings for religious plaintiffs. In another recent example, the court ruled that Maine can’t exclude religious schools from a program that offers tuition aid for private education, a decision that could ease religious organizations’ access to taxpayer money.
In a dissent in Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the coach decision “sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion.” She was joined in her dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan.
That the court ruled for the coach is perhaps not surprising. In 2019, the court declined to take up the case at an early stage, but four of the court’s conservatives agreed that a lower court decision in favor of the school district was “troubling” for its “understanding of the free speech rights of public school teachers.”
The case before the justices involved Joseph Kennedy, a Christian and former football coach at Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Washington. Kennedy started coaching at the school in 2008 and initially prayed alone on the 50-yard line at the end of games. But students started joining him, and over time he began to deliver a short, inspirational talk with religious references. Kennedy did that for years and led students in locker room prayers. The school district learned what he was doing in 2015 and asked him to stop.
Kennedy stopped leading students in prayer in the locker room and on the field but wanted to continue praying on the field himself, with students free to join if they wished. Concerned about being sued for violating students’ religious freedom rights, the school asked him to stop his practice of kneeling and praying while still “on duty” as a coach after the game. The school tried to work out a solution so Kennedy could pray privately before or after the game. When he continued to kneel and pray on the field, the school put him on paid leave.
Three justices on the court attended public high schools themselves while the rest attended Catholic schools.
The case is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 21-418.
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Sorry Justice Sotomayor, the government set itself on the path many years ago when it began its campaign to erase any religious expression from public life which had nothing in common with the ‘establishment clause’. Those who were offended by memorial crosses on public lands and nativity displays in parks seemed to take the day while there were plenty of other offensive secular things allowed to remain. The Court has reestablished the balance between the government and religion.
AND note, they only seemed to go AFTER christianity/catholics, when they did those rules.. NEVER ISLAM!
YAY !!!!!
Yet another correct interpretation of the Constitution. Unfortunately it takes too long to affirm your rights when the left is hell bent on taking them away from you.
Where will this lead? If a teacher can pray on the school grounds what about the classroom?
What about other religions? They have the same rights as Christians do.
3 for 3… So far, so good..
NOW LETS SEE them smack down all those other unconstitutional GUN LAWS>
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Nowhere in the Bill of Rights or the U.S. Constitution say that their must be a separation of Church and State.
– Though not explicitly stated in the First Amendment, the clause is often interpreted to mean that the Constitution requires the separation of church and state.
– The most famous use of the metaphor was by Thomas Jefferson in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association. In it, Jefferson declared (Not the U.S. Constitution) that when the American people adopted the establishment clause they built a “wall of separation between the church and state.”
Scruffy_USN_Retired puts it well.
Having lived in Europe it is common practice for the governments to collect church taxes and distribute them to churches/ religions recognized by the state(s).
Our Founders did not want this practice to carry over to the US because many Immigrants were fled their birth nations for religious persecution for belonging to religious groups suppressed by their former nation. [Puritans, Quakers, Amish, Catholics, Mennonites, Baptists, to cite a few] Also the the 100 year war (1337 to 1453) and 30 year war, (1618 to 1648, caused an estimated 4.5 to 8 million deaths.
NOTE: The Mayflower landed in 1620, with passengers fleeing from the 30 years War) were in the recent memory of the Founders and colonists.
Our Constitution forbids the government from supporting, and equally, prohibiting any particular sect or religious belief.