Supreme Court Sides with High School Football Coach: "He Has a Right to Pray on the 50-Yard Line after Games"
Supreme Court Sides with High School Football Coach: "He Has a Right to Pray on the 50-Yard Line after Games"
How is this even a controversial subject?
The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
For over eight years, Coach Joseph Kennedy routinely offered up prayers after games with most of his team and students joining him. The Supreme Court has now sided with the coach and protected his right to free speech and his right to worship.
The vote came down 6 to 3. I think we all know the radical left Justices on the court voted against his basic constitutional right to free speech. Do you think the three radical Justices would have voted against a Muslim coach praying with his students to Allah?
The case pitted the rights of government workers to free speech and the free exercise of their faith against the Constitution’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion and the ability of public employers to regulate speech in the workplace. The decision was in tension with decades of Supreme Court precedents that forbade pressuring students to participate in religious activities.
This case concerned Coach Joseph Kennedy, an assistant coach at a public high school in Bremerton, Washington. Mr. Kennedy usually led his team in prayer in the locker room before and after games, a practice that he later abandoned and did not challenge at the Supreme Court level.
Over the last 60 years, the Supreme Court has rejected prayer in public schools, at least when it was officially required or part of a formal ceremony like a high school graduation. As recently as 2000, the court ruled that organized prayers led by students at high school football games violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.
“The delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.
Mr. Kennedy was never disciplined for offering silent, private prayers, the judge, Milan D. Smith Jr., wrote last year. Instead, the judge wrote of one game, Mr. Kennedy “prayed out loud in the middle of the football field” just after it finished, “surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.”