Though Friday’s Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (Hot Takes: Watch Progressives Melt Down on Twitter Over Supreme Court Abortion Ruling) has caused a great deal of consternation among progressives, particularly those who confuse sexual license with freedom, and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (Supreme Court Rules You Can’t ‘Bear’ Arms Unless You Can Carry Them for Self-Defense) has reduced those who wished to deprive citizens of a means of resisting tyranny to lumps of protoplasm quivering in front of their Anthony Fauci prayer candles, it is the religious liberty decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (BREAKING: Supreme Court Rules School District Cannot Discipline Coach for Prayer on the Field) that has really filled the air with that pungent aroma of crazy.
From the universe of nutbaggery resorted to by progressives in an attempt to discredit Kennedy, two major themes have emerged.
Those mouthbreathing Christo-fascists on the Supreme Court would never have done this if it was a Muslim plaintiff.
This is, to put it politely, bullshit. If he was a Muslim or Jewish coach, you can be sure the ruling would have been different. https://t.co/Yz1MbO3lM8
— Nancy Armour (@nrarmour) June 27, 2022
Supreme Court opens way for rousing chants of “Allahu Akbar!” before high school sporting events https://t.co/ajjkFKmgrg
— David Frum (@davidfrum) June 27, 2022
The subordinate thread to this accusation is that Christian conservatives will be appalled when they discover that freedom of religion applies to all religions.
Can’t wait for a Muslim football coach to try post-game prayer, and evangelicals lose their mind about ‘the imposition of sharia law.’
‘Religious liberty’ is increasingly just code for the Christian right – only – to violate the Establishment Clause.
— Robert E Kelly (@Robert_E_Kelly) June 27, 2022
This claim is utter nonsense. I would bet that had Coach Kennedy been Muslim or anything other than Evangelical Christian; the Bremerton School District wouldn’t have said jack s*** to him. We would have been inundated with “bold and brave” headlines by the national media. The retaliation against Kennedy was made because he was a Christian engaging in prayer, not the fact that he prayed. I’m also sure that every member of the Kennedy majority is more intelligent than the people making this claim and had figured out that a Constitutional precedent had to be for all Americans.
Just as the claim that the Supreme Court only ruled in this way because the plaintiff was a Christian is blatant nonsense, so, too, is the claim that Christians care about a Muslim football coach praying after a game. By the way, the laws passed and proposed about ‘the imposition of sharia law‘ apply to its use in family courts and as a precedent in civil cases. That said, where sharia law is recognized in the West, its results have been very ugly (Report: Sharia leads to abuse of women in Britain). Kelly isn’t an idiot; he’s just a profoundly dishonest douche hiding behind his credentials. As the facts in the case showed, Kennedy offered a personal prayer. No one was forced or coerced into participating. If a Muslim wanted to sling his prayer rug on the 50-yard line, I suspect most Christians would either ignore it and head for the exit (I would) or stand by respectfully. We would not be leading the charge to have the man fired. In fact, the only place in the US I’ve ever heard of any religion seeking to use the power of state coercion to prevent speech by another religion happened in Dearborn, Michigan. So I don’t think Christian overreaction should be in anyone’s Top 10 Worries.
Kennedy Allows Prayer in Classrooms, and the Christo-Fascists will freak out when their kids are taught Islam.
The second line of attack is that this opens the door to teachers leading prayers in the classroom. This, of course, is something the Supreme Court never considered, and it would also make all of us Christo-Fascists crap ourselves if a Muslim teacher was leading said prayers.
Muslims are supposed to pray 5 times a day. So for the early afternoon prayer, a Muslim teacher should stop the class. Loudly do the adhan, the call to prayer, and then pray towards Mecca. Kids can join or not, nobody will be forced, but the teacher can lead them. It'll be great.
— Wajahat Ali (@WajahatAli) June 27, 2022
NEW: The Supreme Court just ruled 6-3 that public school teachers and other staff can now lead students in prayer, significantly undermining the separation of church and state and overturning decades of established precedence.
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) June 27, 2022
The Supreme Court ruled nothing of the kind. Kennedy was a very narrow case decided on the facts and circumstances in this case. This is how the Kennedy majority sums it up.
Our judgments on all these scores find support in this Court’s prior cases too. In Zorach, for example, challengers argued that a public school program permitting students to spend time in private religious instruction off campus was impermissibly coercive. Id., at 308, 311–312. The Court rejected that challenge because students were not required to attend religious instruction and there was no evidence that any employee had “us[ed] their office to persuade or force students” to participate in religious activity. Id., at 311, and n. 6. What was clear there is even more obvious here—where there is no evidence anyone sought to persuade or force students to participate, and there is no formal school program accommodating the religious activity at issue.
Meanwhile, this case looks very different from those in which this Court has found prayer involving public school students to be problematically coercive. In Lee, this Court held that school officials violated the Establishment Clause by “including [a] clerical membe[r]” who publicly recited prayers “as part of [an] official school graduation ceremony” because the school had “in every practical sense compelled attendance and participation in” a “religious exercise.”
U. S., at 580, 598. In Santa Fe Independent School Dist. v. Doe, the Court held that a school district violated the Establishment Clause by broadcasting a prayer “over the public address system” before each football game. 530 U. S. 290, 294 (2000). The Court observed that, while students generally were not required to attend games, attendance was required for “cheerleaders, members of the band, and, of course, the team members themselves.” Id., at 311. None of that is true here. The prayers for which Mr. Kennedy was disciplined were not publicly broadcast or recited to a captive audience. Students were not required or expected to participate. And, in fact, none of Mr. Kennedy’s students did participate in any of the three October 2015 prayers that resulted in Mr. Kennedy’s discipline. See App. 90, 97,173, 236–239; Parts I–B and I–C, supra.7
The minority opinion authored by the Wide Wise Latina™ descended into dishonest trollery by including images of later instances in which players and spectators spontaneously joined Kennedy at mid-field. Kennedy was fired for earlier private prayers, and, as the majority opinion points out, the topic of coercion was not raised at any point in the legal proceedings until Kagan asked a hypothetical question. This is the exchange as reported by SCOTUSBlog:
Justice Elena Kagan suggested that the focus on whether Kennedy’s prayers were “government speech” was misplaced. What the justices should really be worried about, she said, is pressure on students to participate in religious activities when they don’t want to.
[Paul] Clement countered that the lower courts’ rulings had rested on the premise that the school district wanted to avoid being seen as endorsing religion, rather than concerns about coercion.
Kagan pushed back, outlining a scenario in which the school district had properly asserted that it wanted to ensure that students did not feel coerced to join the prayers because their playing time might hinge on it, which would be “improper for 16-year-olds.”
Clement conceded that concerns about coercion “may well be well placed” if the coach were giving the prayer as part of a post-game talk, but he suggested that they would not be raised by a “15-second fleeting prayer” alone at midfield.
And when Kagan suggested a variation on those hypotheticals, in which a coach who had been asked to stop including a prayer in his post-game talk decided to delay the start of the talk and fill the gap with a prayer, Clement again acknowledged that there “may well be a coercion concern,” but he added that a 15-second prayer at midfield, while most of the players are still in the end zone, would not be “coercion that counts under the establishment clause.”
Anyone even hinting that the Supreme Court opened the way for teachers, of any religion or denomination to engage in religious activities with their students during instructional time or under circumstances
NOTE: This was Paul Clement’s second Supreme Court win during this term, and he was fired for his efforts; Major Law Firm Fires the Lawyer Who Won the Biggest Second Amendment Case in a Decade.
The Court made it very clear that this case differs from previous prayer-at-school cases and why. In no way does the Kennedy decision permit teachers to teach religion in class. It definitely does not permit, as a clownish Wajahat Ali claims, that a teacher could indoctrinate children in Islamic theology or lead them in prayer. Of course, it doesn’t allow kids to be baptized either, but sane people know that. What the Court did do was set aside one particular test for evaluating violations of the Establishment Clause in favor of a method articulated in a later opinion (Supreme Court De Facto Overrules Longstanding Precedent Used to Push Religion out of the Public Square).
The people making these baseless claims are not stupid. They are remorseless liars who think you are stupid. They are trying to push a narrative to mislead the dimwitted and fire up the progressive base, though I admit that the Venn Diagram of those two groups is nearly a single circle.
The crazy that the religious liberty decision has brought out shows just how terrified the bigots of the anti-religious left are of religion in any setting. Their godless hedonism can’t fight what happens when citizens, particularly children in a public school setting, understand that Truth is as fixed as the North Star. It is not malleable and subjective, and there is a power higher than what your crotch desires and the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity goobers.
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