The Supreme Court has ruled that a former Washington state high school football coach had the right to lead his team in prayer at the 50-yard line after games.
CNN reports the Supreme Court determined in a 6-3 decision on Monday that Bremerton School District violated the First Amendment rights of Joe Kennedy (pictured above), a former assistant football coach at Bremerton High who was fired in 2016 because he refused to stop praying on the field after games.
“Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the Court’s opinion. “And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress. Religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech. The Constitution neither mandates nor tolerates that kind of discrimination.”
Gorsuch went on say that the Constitution, as well as “the best of our traditions,” do not seek to censor “religious and nonreligious views alike.”
“Both the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect expressions like Mr. Kennedy’s,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “Nor does a proper understanding of the Amendment’s Establishment Clause require the government to single out private religious speech for special disfavor. The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.”
The news arrives nearly six years after Kennedy, who was initially placed on administrative leave in September 2015 due to his post-game praying, sued the district in August 2016 for violating his First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise of his faith.
