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The Supreme Court's Fake Praying Coach Case Just Got Faker
The Supreme Court’s Fake Praying Coach Case Just Got FakerLast year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school football coach’s right to engage in “brief, quiet, personal” prayer—despite photographic evidence that his prayers were drawn-out, loud, and extremely public. At the time, the decision was embarrassing enough, as it rested on the fiction that the coach, Joe Kennedy, was reprimanded for “private religious expression” when he was actually establishing huge prayer circles in the middle of the field. Since then, the situation has only further exposed the shameful artifice of the ruling. At first, Kennedy appeared to have little interest in taking back his old job, which was supposedly what he was fighting for. Then he acknowledged that he had sold his house and moved across the country, with no plans to move back. Finally, on Friday, Kennedy returned to coach one football game. Then he quit, as the Seattle Times reported on Wednesday. He has no evident desire to exercise the rights that his lawyers fought for over years of litigation. Those lawyers, however, will walk away with $1.775 million in attorneys’ fees, paid out by the school district.
This final chapter of the “Coach Kennedy” saga was foreseeable—inevitable, really—well before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in June 2022. Kennedy has lived in Florida for years, which the court knew but ignored in its race to use his case as a vehicle to expand prayer in public schools. It’s the mirror image of 303 Creative v. Elenis, the big religious freedom case handed down this June, which also rested on allegations that ranged from tenuous to outright bogus. The problem here is simple: Conservative litigators want this Supreme Court to expand a vision of religious liberty that abolishes the separation of church and state while granting Christians a freewheeling right to discriminate, often with public funding. They are seizing upon any case that will give the court this opportunity, with little concern for the truth of the underlying claims. And the Republican-appointed justices seem eager to twist reality into whatever shape necessary to give them what they want.
If these justices cared to look, they could have forecast the twists that followed their decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The case was built on a shaky foundation: Kennedy and his lawyers, led by Paul Clement and the far-right First Liberty Institute, alleged that the school district instructed him to stop praying on the field during and after football games, and fired him when he refused. These prayers, he said, were hushed, personal expressions of faith that players were free to join or ignore. In truth, the prayers were a spectacle. Kennedy would gather students around him in a large circle, lift a helmet, and lead them in overtly sectarian prayer; non-Christian players felt coerced into joining, assuming (quite reasonably) that their coach would show favoritism toward those who participated.
This kind of coercive religious conduct strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which guards against sectarian indoctrination at public schools. In a 6–3 decision, though, the Supreme Court found that Kennedy’s prayers were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and free exercise. To reach this conclusion, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion rewrote the facts, depicting Kennedy’s prayers as fleeting, muted, and unobtrusive. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent repudiated this lie with pictures of the sprawling prayer circles, which Gorsuch disregarded. He instead embraced what one lower court judge decried as “the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel.”
There was, all this time, another huge red flag in Kennedy v. Bremerton: Coach Kennedy said he wanted an injunction forcing the school district to rehire him—but he lived thousands of miles away. Bremerton School District is in Washington State, where Kennedy lived when the case commenced. As it dragged on, though, he sold his home in Washington and relocated to Florida with his wife. When the school district’s lawyers discovered this move, they advised the Supreme Court that the case had become moot, arguing that Kennedy clearly did not want his job back.
This final chapter of the “Coach Kennedy” saga was foreseeable—inevitable, really—well before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in June 2022. Kennedy has lived in Florida for years, which the court knew but ignored in its race to use his case as a vehicle to expand prayer in public schools. It’s the mirror image of 303 Creative v. Elenis, the big religious freedom case handed down this June, which also rested on allegations that ranged from tenuous to outright bogus. The problem here is simple: Conservative litigators want this Supreme Court to expand a vision of religious liberty that abolishes the separation of church and state while granting Christians a freewheeling right to discriminate, often with public funding. They are seizing upon any case that will give the court this opportunity, with little concern for the truth of the underlying claims. And the Republican-appointed justices seem eager to twist reality into whatever shape necessary to give them what they want.
If these justices cared to look, they could have forecast the twists that followed their decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The case was built on a shaky foundation: Kennedy and his lawyers, led by Paul Clement and the far-right First Liberty Institute, alleged that the school district instructed him to stop praying on the field during and after football games, and fired him when he refused. These prayers, he said, were hushed, personal expressions of faith that players were free to join or ignore. In truth, the prayers were a spectacle. Kennedy would gather students around him in a large circle, lift a helmet, and lead them in overtly sectarian prayer; non-Christian players felt coerced into joining, assuming (quite reasonably) that their coach would show favoritism toward those who participated.
This kind of coercive religious conduct strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which guards against sectarian indoctrination at public schools. In a 6–3 decision, though, the Supreme Court found that Kennedy’s prayers were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and free exercise. To reach this conclusion, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion rewrote the facts, depicting Kennedy’s prayers as fleeting, muted, and unobtrusive. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent repudiated this lie with pictures of the sprawling prayer circles, which Gorsuch disregarded. He instead embraced what one lower court judge decried as “the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel.”
There was, all this time, another huge red flag in Kennedy v. Bremerton: Coach Kennedy said he wanted an injunction forcing the school district to rehire him—but he lived thousands of miles away. Bremerton School District is in Washington State, where Kennedy lived when the case commenced. As it dragged on, though, he sold his home in Washington and relocated to Florida with his wife. When the school district’s lawyers discovered this move, they advised the Supreme Court that the case had become moot, arguing that Kennedy clearly did not want his job back.
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