The Supreme Court of the United States took down government hostility to Christianity today at the 50-yard mark. Bremerton High School, Wash., violated former football coach Joe Kennedy’s right to pray on its football field when it fired him in 2016, the court ruled.
The court’s 6-3 ruling in Kennedy v. Bremerton followed the same ideological lines as last week’s ruling on abortion. Kennedy’s prayer should have been respected as First Amendment free speech, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for in the majority opinion:
“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.”
The dispute over Kennedy’s on-field, postgame prayers started in 2008. Some of his teammates joined Kennedy in praying for him after he had stopped doing it by himself. Fearing a lawsuit by the ACLU, Bremerton School District in Washington warned him to stop. After being placed on administrative leave in 2016, the district later refused to renew his contract.
Kennedy’s defense team countered that he had been involved in private free speech, as protected by the First Amendment. He told Fox News in April:
“The prayer after the football game — that was just myself, I would just take a knee at the 50-yard line after football game. After a few months, the kids would say, ‘Coach, what are you doing out there?’ And I just said, ‘I was thanking God for what you did.’ They asked if they could join. And I said, ‘It’s America, a free country. You do what you want to do.’ And that’s how that kind of started.”
Justice Gorsuch also wrote that the First Amendment does not discriminate between religious and secular speech: “Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress.”
Justice Clarence Thomas stated that there was no legal basis to reprimand Coach Kennedy. Justice Samuel Alito also agreed because he stated that Coach Kennedy had been praying in private.
Justices Elena Kagan (Stephen Breyer), and Sonia Sotomayor disapproved of the decision. They voted in favor government hostility towards Christianity. Sports Illustrated also backed this unconstitutional position in a lengthy, recent exposé, declaring Kennedy’s actions threatened to erode democracy.
In her lame dissent, Sotomayor wrote the Court “once again weakens the backstop. It elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all.”
Kennedy left Bremerton after his firing, and moved to Florida. He would love to return as a coach at his former school.
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