Another day passes, and another high-stakes U.S. Supreme Court case is found to have been built on lies. There’s no reason to be surprised by that anymore – as I wrote about back in July, the 6-3 conservative bloc of the Supreme Court has made it clear that its rulings don’t need to rely on outdated legal concepts like “standing” or “precedent.” But until one of the other branches of the federal government actually calls the Court’s bluff, we still have to live with their decisions, regardless of whether or not the facts support those rulings.
United States Supreme Court Building By Carol M. Highsmith – Library of CongressCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2011631106Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/highsm/12900/12912a.tifOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/highsm.12912, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91285025
The case in question today is Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, which drove a spike into the heart of the separation of church and state last year. To summarize: Joe Kennedy, an assistant football coach at Bremerton High School in the state of Washington, made a habit of going out to the 50-yard line following games to pray in an ostentatious display of his Christianity. He was joined by players from his team and sometimes players and coaches from opposing teams. The school board feared that this would violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, and tried to negotiate with Kennedy to pray in private or after the crowd had gone home, but Kennedy refused to follow these directions. He was placed on paid suspension and then not re-hired for the following school year, which led to the lawsuit.
While The Wild Hunt covered the case when it was decided last year, it’s worth reiterating some of the tomfoolery that went on in the decision: In a 6-3 decision, the Court held that the school district was infringing on Kennedy’s rights under the First Amendment to freedom of speech and freedom of religious exercise. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, portrayed Kennedy’s practice as quiet, reflective prayer that took place during a period when he had no other work duties to attend to.
But Justice Sotomayor, writing for the minority, included photographs that showed that there was nothing “private” or “quiet” about it – Kennedy was surrounded by dozens of students, all praying in the middle of the field while a crowd of onlookers could see them. Kennedy was manifestly using his position as a school employee to promote his specific religious practice to students and community members.
Gorsuch’s opinion that Kennedy would have had a right to engage in quiet and private prayer would have been reasonable, would that it were what actually happened on the field. Instead, this adult authority figure is out there publicly leading Christian prayers at a school function. Some students begin to pray with him. What would a young Pagan student on the team feel compelled to do in that situation? He probably does not want to participate in the prayer – after all, he is not Christian – but he probably does want to continue playing football, and the coach has a lot of power to decide whether or not he gets to. That’s not to even get into the peer pressure aspect – no member of a religious minority wants to find another reason to be ostracized.
A football player kneeling [Keithjj, Pixabay]
That’s all old news, I suppose – Kennedy is a bad decision that continues this Court’s agenda of putting the individual rights of white Christians to undermine the rights of any minority group. The reason Kennedy is back in the news is because, as reported by Slate, the case was built on a lie: namely, that Kennedy wanted his job back in the first place.
Kennedy’s case relied on the notion that he wanted to continue working as an assistant football coach in the Bremerton School District; reinstatement was the main thing he was suing for (though his lawyers likely didn’t mind the nearly $1.8 million in fees they collected from the district.) He even claimed, “I am ready and willing to resume my coaching duties in Bremerton, WA. I can do so within 24 hours of reinstatement, if I am still temporarily residing in Florida.”
Catch that? “Still temporarily residing in Florida?” He had sold his house and moved to Florida in 2020, two whole years before the Supreme Court heard the case in 2022. He wasn’t even coaching football anymore, having moved on to a lucrative career on the right-wing media circuit, as have many other big-name conservative Supreme Court plaintiffs. As it happens, Kennedy was reinstated to his job in Bremerton for the 2023-24 school year, came back to coach one (1) game, and then promptly resigned from the job his lawyers claimed he was “champing at the bit” to resume.
“After the game — a 27-12 win over visiting Mount Douglas Secondary School — Kennedy strode alone to midfield, then knelt and prayed for about 10 seconds,” reports Religion News Service. “Kennedy was not joined by any athletes or others on the nearly empty field. There was scattered applause from the modest crowd.” At least we were spared his coaching career ending on a triumphal note.
He submitted his resignation shortly thereafter, claiming he could “best continue to advocate for constitutional freedom and religious liberty by working from outside the school system,” according to a statement on his website. Slate reports that while he was in town for his one (1) game as coach, he “crashed at a friend’s place,” not even putting up the pretense that he was moving back to Washington.
All of this means that there was no actual case under discussion here – he did not want his job back at all. It was a moot point. And yet Pagan children and Pagan employees of the government, along with other religious minorities and the non-religious, will have to live with the consequences of Kennedy vs. Bremerton regardless, much as we have to live with 303 Creative vs. Elenis (where no queer couple actually tried to buy a website from a Christian web developer) and West Virginia vs. EPA (where the federal government was barred from making some environmental regulations on the basis of a rule that was never actually implemented.) These days, it’s easy to get a landmark Supreme Court decision – as long as the conservative bloc can pretend something related to the precedent they want to overturn might have, possibly, happened, maybe, they are only too happy to hear the case.
It’s one more proof that we have entered the era of the Imperial Supreme Court – and like all empires, they expect us to obey the Emperor’s word as a god’s.
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