Praying Coach’s Religious Rights Logic Scores With Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court signaled it is likely to side with a praying football coach in the latest dispute seeking to bolster religious rights.

The justices on Monday heard arguments from Joseph Kennedy, who lost his job at a public high school outside Seattle after repeatedly taking a knee alongside his players on the 50-yard line after games.

The coach said the district violated his constitutional rights by punishing what he regards as private religious expression, but the Bremerton School District argued Kennedy’s prayers were becoming a community spectacle and leaving players feeling pressured to join.

The justices struggled to find the proper line to draw to balance the First Amendment rights of teachers and coaches with the school’s need to protect students.

Justice Elena Kagan Kagan said players might believe their playing time would hinge on their participation in a prayer. She raised the possibility of a coach praying as part of a post-game talk -- or a teacher doing so in math class -- after telling students that the school district wasn’t requiring the prayer.

“That seems to me to be coercive of 16-year-olds regardless if they know that it’s him and not the school district,” Kagan said. “He is the one who’s going to give me an A or not.”

Several justices suggested that coercion wasn’t the real reason behind the school district’s actions.

“One of the difficulties of this case is getting one’s hands around the district’s rationale,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said, suggesting instead that the district was motivated by an incorrect understanding of what the separation of church and states means.

The case -- the fourth religious rights argument of the Supreme Court’s term -- is likely to provide the conservative-majority court an opportunity to further relax that doctrine.

“His expression was entirely his own,” said Kennedy’s lawyer Paul Clement. “That private religious expression was doubly protected by the free exercise and the free speech clauses.”

The case has drawn a blizzard of filings from interested outsiders, including former professional football players on both sides of the case. Kennedy has the support of 27 states, five former Republican attorneys general and more than 70 members of Congress. Bremerton has backing from 13 states, the District of Columbia and 11 federal lawmakers. The Biden administration isn’t taking a position.

The Supreme Court has already ruled this year that death-row inmates can have spiritual advisers play an active role in the execution chamber. The justices are also considering strengthening the rights of parents to use public funds to send their children to religious schools, and the court is weighing whether a Christian group should have been allowed to fly its flag over Boston’s City Hall, like other organizations.

In its next term, the court will hear an appeal from a website designer who says she shouldn’t be forced under a Colorado anti-discrimination law to create pages for same-sex weddings. Although that case centers on the Constitution’s free-speech guarantee, the designer says she has a religious objection to gay marriage.

Community Spectacle

Bremerton School District says that after officials asked Kennedy to stop praying alongside his players, he made a series of media appearances that turned his post-game prayers into a firestorm as students and community members rushed the field to join him. The district says it offered Kennedy alternative, less public places to say his post-game prayers.

The school eventually put Kennedy on paid administrative leave and then opted not to renew his contract as an assistant varsity coach at the end of the year.

In rejecting Kennedy’s First Amendment claims, the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the school district would have been violating the constitutional separation of church and state had it allowed the prayers to continue.

“The law is clear that teachers and coaches cannot lead public school students in prayer,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is representing the school district. “That’s what makes this case so urgent -- a loss would dangerously erode church-state separation, a core principle of our democracy.”

The Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that the Constitution forbids teacher-led prayer in public schools. The case doesn’t directly challenge that precedent.

Seven Years

Kennedy, who describes himself as a devout Christian, had been praying at midfield for seven years when the controversy erupted in 2015. Throughout much of that time, he delivered prayers to his players, both on the field and in the locker room, according to the district. School officials say they didn’t learn of the practice until an opposing coach told the Bremerton principal that Kennedy had invited the coach and his players to join.

Kennedy says he agreed to stop leading prayers with his players but wanted to continue taking a knee at midfield after games. He says that activity is protected by the Constitution’s free-speech clause as well as its religion clause.

When a coach isn’t engaged in official duties, “a school may not lay claim to all of his speech just because he is still on the premises and serves as a role model,” Kennedy argued.

The school district contends it has broad power to control its own events, protect the rights of non-praying students and ensure it doesn’t get sued for sponsoring prayer.

“Kennedy would unwind decades of this court’s jurisprudence, cast aside employers’ interests, and introduce untold confusion for government offices and courts alike,” Bremerton argued.

The case, which the court will decide by July, is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 21-418.

To contact the reporters on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net;
Kimberly Robinson in Arlington at krobinson103@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

Seth Stern

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