![]() The football games became a chaotic mess of culture-war politicking, with reporters, politicians, and evangelical Christians flocking to the field to witness Kennedy’s displays and join him in prayer. Before his departure from Bremerton, Kennedy spent months working with his media-savvy legal team to draw attention to his own prayers. Kennedy and the First Liberty Institute, the conservative legal group that is funding his lawsuit, have tried to cast him as a first amendment hero. He eventually left the school – voluntarily – and began to claim that the district’s policies amounted to both religious discrimination and a violation of his free speech rights. The school tried to accommodate Kennedy, offering him ways to exercise his faith that did not involve students, and did not risk giving the impression that his religion was endorsed by the public school. It is these public prayers, conducted while Kennedy was acting in his official capacity as the coach, that became an issue. “It made sense to do it on the field of battle,” he told the reporter Adam Liptak. Kennedy says that the visible center of the field was an important location for him. Teen athletes, both from his team and from the opposing side, would kneel with him in a large scrum Kennedy mixed his prayers with pep talks. He would stand on the 50-yardline just after the final whistle, and pray out loud. But at some point, Kennedy’s praying became louder, and more public. The film features a fictional coach who prays with his high school football team. He says that he got the initial idea from a movie, the low-budget 2006 Christian football drama “Facing the Giants,” which he saw on TV. Starting from when he began coaching in 2008, Kennedy, an evangelical Christian, initially prayed to himself at games, a practice that nobody had a problem with. It should not escape us that in issuing this ruling, and overturning a decades-old test for establishing the efficacy of church-state separation measures, the court relied on a version of the facts that is blatantly, demonstrably false.Īll of this could have been avoided, because in fact, over the course of Kennedy’s employment, the school district took pains to balance the coach’s desire for prayer with their own obligations to remain religiously neutral. Thus, the court allowed the free exercise clause to effectively moot the establishment clause, denying Americans like Coach Kennedy’s students the freedom from religion that the church-state divide had previously granted them. The court held that the school was required to allow this: that in attempting to maintain separation of church and state – as is required by the first amendment’s establishment clause – they were actually infringing on Coach Kennedy’s free exercise rights. Spectators can be seen in the background, looking on from the stands. Kennedy is speaking with a football helmet in his hand, stretched high above his head in what looks like a gesture of command. In the picture, he stands surrounded by a dense group of dozens of high school football players, uniformed and kneeling at his feet. In her dissent, Justice Sonya Sotomayor cast doubt on the idea that the coach offered his prayers “quietly, while his students were otherwise occupied.” She included a photograph of Coach Kennedy at one of his game night prayers. But evidence suggests things looked different. Sam Alito, in his concurrence, claimed that Kennedy “acted in a purely private capacity.” That’s Kennedy’s version of events. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.” Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. In allowing Coach Kennedy to pray publicly at school, while conducting his official duties as a public official, Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, characterized the prayers this way: “Mr. The facts of what happened with Coach Kennedy at the school district are contested, but only because Kennedy himself keeps revising them. Students now face the prospect of their schools becoming sites of religious pressure and indoctrination
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