WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a former high school football coach who lost his job for offering prayers at the 50-yard line after games despite objections from the school district that students felt compelled to take part.
In the latest instance of the nation’s highest court backing a religious freedom claim, a majority of the justices said that assistant coach Joseph Kennedy’s prayers were a private matter and did not amount to the school district’s endorsement of Christianity.
Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote 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,” Gorsuch wrote.
Kennedy was placed on administrative leave in 2015 from his job at Bremerton High School, a public school near Seattle. The San Francisco-based US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled last year that Kennedy was acting as a public employee when he offered the prayers and so his actions were not protected by the First Amendment.
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School officials said they offered Kennedy the option of praying elsewhere. They said they heard from players’ parents who were concerned their children felt compelled by peer pressure to participate. Kennedy countered that the accommodations were impractical because the spaces that officials offered were “insanely far away from my players.” And he said he never asked and pressured anyone else to pray with him.
During the April oral arguments in the case, several of the conservative justices indicated they thought the prayers were a private matter and different from a teacher praying in a classroom with students present. The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that public schools could not offer prayerseven if participation by students is voluntary.
The court has looked favorably on religious freedom claims in recent disputes over the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which prohibits the government from becoming entangled with religion, and the amendment’s free exercise clause, which guarantees the right to practice religion free of government interference.
In 2014, the court upheld a centuries-old tradition of offering prayers to open government meetings, even if those prayers are overwhelmingly Christian. In 2019, the court ruled that a Latin cross on government land outside Washington, DC, did not have to be moved or altered in the name of church-state separation. In May, the Supreme Court ruled that Boston could not deny a Christian group the ability to raise a flag at City Hall alongside secular organizations that are encouraged to do so to celebrate the city’s diversity.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism