Supreme Court Give Ok To WA, Coach’s Post Game Mid-Field Prayers

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High Court Backs Coach

He didn't and this morning the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of a former Washington State high school football coach Joe Kennedy.

The coach had prayed on the 50-yard line after every game for years and it ultimately cost him his job.  He felt it was a foul against the constitution and his first amendment protected freedom of speech so he blew the whistle and went to court.

Common Sense Isn't Unanimous

It took seven years to get a two-letter answer.  The high court ruled in a 6-3 decision that the answer to those questions was a “no.”

It seems pretty simple, so why did the government pursue the case in the first place, and this is interesting - according to a published report, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote:

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. 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

Is This The Mission?

"ferret out and suppress" Really?  If that's what the government sees its role as, it's good the coach won, on a number of levels!

To Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote that the coach's actions were potentially "coercive" to the students who were "vulnerable" to the pressure to pray, I would say this.  First, in case she hasn't noticed, today's kids are pretty good at ignoring adults and secondly, many of these impressionable and vulnerable children somehow manage to vote for the President of the United State before they graduate, and some enlist in the military the day after they graduate, so there would seem to be a schizophrenic disconnect between the capabilities of what the students can and can't handle.  Don't forget that at times some students are compelled to celebrate Pride Month and welcome drag queens to the classroom. But that's not coercive???

We'll save that one for another time, for now, people of all religious faiths can take heart that there is a distinction between in the conversation over the blind blanket policy of separation of church and state and that there is a place for their personal beliefs in the shadow of the government.