WASHINGTON (JTA) – The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a Seattle-area football coach who lost his job after praying on the field following his team’s victory, in a ruling that calls for Jews in public schools and the military. could make an impact.
Several Jewish groups say the 6-3 decision in Kennedy v Bremerton released Monday could roll back church-state segregation that has protected schoolchildren from religious pressure for decades.
“This is a significant change in how we pray in public schools, and one that will have a particularly negative impact on students from marginalized religions and non-religious students,” said Rachel Robbins, president of the Anti-Defamation League for Civil . Rights Committee. ADL, which attended the friend-of-court briefing on behalf of the school district, said it was “deeply disturbed” by the decision.
Expressions of concern came despite assurances by Justice Neil Gorsuch that the ruling was in line with a 1992 Supreme Court ruling in favor of a famous Rhode Island Jewish family who objected to the priests’ leading prayer at their children’s public school.
Writing for the court’s conservative majority, Gorsuch quoted from that decision, Lee v. Weisman, in which the court held that “religious beliefs and religious expression are too valuable to be restricted or determined by the state.”
The ruling Monday in favor of Joseph Kennedy, an assistant coach in Bremerton, Washington, of the school district, wrote Gorsuch, is how the First Amendment protects religious freedom.
Jewish groups weren’t buying it.
Mark Stern, chief legal officer of the American Jewish Committee, said, “The Court’s no-evil approach to Coach’s Prayer will encourage those who try to prosecute within public schools.” Court-of-court summary from the school district.
Joe Kennedy, a former assistant football coach at Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Wash., poses for a photo at the school’s football field on March 9, 2022. (AP/Ted S. Warren, file)
“This is no advance for religious freedom,” Stern said.
Bremerton’s case focused on Kennedy’s activities, which began by praying alone at the 50-yard line and not calling on others to join him. But soon after, students and others began joining Kennedy in prayer, which worried the school district. It proposed alternatives, including allowing him to pray after the game, but he declined and continued to pray for increased media attention. The school district decided not to renew his contract.
The court concluded, essentially, that by barring a Christian high school coach from praying, the school district had violated his civil rights, forcing other children to pray.
“Here, a government institution sought to punish a person for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious ritual,” Gorsuch said, emphasizing that Kennedy explicitly called on students in prayer. was not requested to attend.
“It seems clear to us that Mr. Kennedy has demonstrated that his speech was a private speech, not a government speech,” Gorsuch wrote. “This case looks very different from those in which this Court has found the prayer involving public school students to be problematically coercive,” he said, specifically citing Lee v. Weisman.
Weisman involved a Baptist pastor who said at a 1986 middle school graduation ceremony in Providence, “Please rise up and praise Jesus for the achievements of these kids today.”
Merritt Weisman’s parents, Vivian, assistant executive director at the local Jewish Community Center, and Daniel, a social work professor, were incarcerated, and the prayer started a series of events and lawsuits that culminated in the landmark 1992 case.
That decision was 5-4. The late Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia, who was replaced by Gorsuch, said that over the years it had been wrongly judged, and the religious authority agreed.
President Donald Trump named three conservative justices, and with a new balance of power, the Supreme Court has ticked off a wish list in recent weeks from school picks for religious conservatives to reversing abortion rights.
AJC’s Stern said Gorsuch was cherry-picking quotes from an earlier decision to make his opinion less far-fetched.
“There is a tendency to sanctify a practice, to rip it from its historical roots, and to view it in splendid isolation, and so it [appears] Not so terrible, ”Stern said in an interview.
Kennedy, as an assistant coach, may not have the same power as the principal in the Rhode Island case, who invited the pastors, Stern said, but the coach still had tremendous power over the students, and suggesting otherwise is fraudulent. was.
“Kids will do anything to get on a coach’s good side and have play time,” Stern said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for moderate minorities in dissent, made a similar point, illustrating it with a photo of students surrounding Kennedy in prayer.
Sotomayor wrote, “Many parents reached out to the district saying that their children had participated fully in Kennedy’s prayer so that they would not isolate themselves from the rest of the team.” “No [Bremerton High School] After Kennedy’s suspension, students were seen praying on the field.
The National Council of Jewish Women, which is also a signatory to the court-of-court brief, said the latest decision was one in a series that erased church-state separation, among others, most recently in Maine. Referred to the decision directing the state to pay. For religious schooling for students who find it difficult to access public schools.
“No student should have to choose between their religious freedom and being part of the school’s activities,” Jody Rabhan, the group’s chief policy officer, said in a statement. “But today’s decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton could force children enrolled in public schools to do the same.”
Jewish veteran Mickey Weinstein, who leads the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which advocates for religion-state segregation in the military, said the ruling would undermine his years-long efforts to remove Christian prayers from the Military Academy athletic events.
The decision will serve to “completely and expeditiously destroy the precious wall separating church and state in our country, and in particular the US military,” he said.