Supreme Court sides with coach over prayers on 50-yard line

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a high school football coach had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.

The vote was 6-3, with the court’s three liberal members in dissent.

The case pitted the rights of government workers to free speech and the free exercise of their faith against the Constitution’s prohibition of government endorsement of religion and the ability of public employers to regulate speech in the workplace. The decision was in tension with decades of Supreme Court precedents that forbade pressuring students to participate in religious activities.

The case concerned Joseph Kennedy, an assistant coach at a public high school in Bremerton, Washington, near Seattle. For eight years, Kennedy routinely offered prayers after games, with students often joining him. He also led and participated in prayers in the locker room, a practice he later abandoned and did not defend in the Supreme Court.

In 2015, after an opposing coach told the principal at Kennedy’s school that he thought it was “pretty cool” that Kennedy was allowed to pray on the field, the school board instructed Kennedy not to pray if it interfered with his duties or involved students. The two sides disagreed about whether Kennedy complied.

A school official recommended that the coach’s contract not be renewed for the 2016 season, and Kennedy did not reapply for the position.

The two sides offered starkly different accounts of what had happened in Kennedy’s final months, complicating the Supreme Court’s task. Kennedy said he sought only to offer a brief, silent and solitary prayer little different from saying grace before a meal in the school cafeteria. The school board responded that the public nature of his prayers and his stature as a leader and role model meant that students felt forced to participate, whatever their religion and whether they wanted to.

Over the past 60 years, the Supreme Court has rejected prayer in public schools, at least when it was officially required or part of a formal ceremony such as a high school graduation. As recently as 2000, the court ruled that organized prayers led by students at high school football games violated the First Amendment’s prohibition of government establishment of religion.

“The delivery of a pregame prayer has the improper effect of coercing those present to participate in an act of religious worship,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority.

Kennedy’s attorneys said those school prayer precedents were not relevant because they involved government speech. The core question in Kennedy’s case, they said, was whether government employees give up their own rights to free speech and the free exercise of religion at the workplace.

The school district, its attorneys responded, was entitled to require Kennedy to stop praying as he had.

“Regardless of whether Kennedy’s very public speech was official, the district could regulate it,” the school district’s Supreme Court brief said. “His prayer practice wrested control from the district over the district’s own events, interfered with students’ religious freedom and subjected the district to substantial litigation risks.”

The school district noted that a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, had criticized what he called “a deceitful narrative” created by Kennedy’s attorneys.

Kennedy was never disciplined for offering silent, private prayers, the judge, Milan D. Smith Jr., wrote last year. Instead, the judge wrote of one game, Kennedy “prayed out loud in the middle of the football field” just after it finished, “surrounded by players, members of the opposing team, parents, a local politician and members of the news media with television cameras recording the event, all of whom had been advised of Kennedy’s intended actions through the local news and social media.”

When the Supreme Court refused to hear an earlier appeal in the case in 2019, four justices expressed qualms about how Kennedy had been treated.

“The 9th Circuit’s understanding of the free speech rights of public-school teachers is troubling and may justify review in the future,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote at the time, adding that the justices should wait for more information about “important unresolved factual questions.” He was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.

After further proceedings, the 9th Circuit again ruled for the school board. This time, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, No. 21-418. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.