Supreme Court breaks down wall between church and state

[carmenjonze]

No reason he can’t do private and solitary prayer on the football field. Home turf to a football coach. Seems appropriate.

Can’t wait to watch you defend the Wicca coach doing a blood ritual on the 50 yard line and calling it appropriate.

[carmenjonze]

What are all these conservative Christian supremacists going to do when the Jesus-only fundies and Oneness Pentecostals — oh my goodness — learn their precious brats are praying a prayer in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit at the 50 yard line?

[carmenjonze]

Fascinating question: does your right to pray under religious freedom give you a right to do it whenever and wherever you want?

These colonizers think the government gives them the right to groom other peoples’ children into doing so, whenever and wherever they want.

[ProfX]

If this is private and solitary prayer, I'm the Queen of England.



Prepare to be knighted, squire.

These are Muslims praying in Indonesia. Yes, they are in a roadway.



I guarantee if Muslims in the U.S. started blocking traffic for their daily prayers, some of these MAGAts would foam at the mouth. The right to pray where you feel like -- yeah, that will be upheld by MAGA for a microsecond.

[Bludogdem]

If this is private and solitary prayer, I'm the Queen of England.



Prepare to be knighted, squire.

These are Muslims praying in Indonesia. Yes, they are in a roadway.



I guarantee if Muslims in the U.S. started blocking traffic for their daily prayers, some of these MAGAts would foam at the mouth. The right to pray where you feel like -- yeah, that will be upheld by MAGA for a microsecond.

Silent by its nature is private.

It is so useful to actually read the opinion. Illuminating and rife with facts.

“ The contested exercise before us does not involve lead- ing prayers with the team or before any other captive audi- ence. Mr. Kennedy’s “religious beliefs do not require [him] to lead any prayer . . . involving students.” Id., at 170. At the District’s request, he voluntarily discontinued the school tradition of locker-room prayers and his postgame religious talks to students. The District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015. ”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 8_i425.pdf

Silent and Private.

None of those pictures apply to the case before the court your majesty.

[carmenjonze]

If this is private and solitary prayer, I'm the Queen of England.



Prepare to be knighted, squire.

These are Muslims praying in Indonesia. Yes, they are in a roadway.



I guarantee if Muslims in the U.S. started blocking traffic for their daily prayers, some of these MAGAts would foam at the mouth. The right to pray where you feel like -- yeah, that will be upheld by MAGA for a microsecond.

Well, they'd keep doing what Dylann Roof and Payton Gendron did, which is run to the Black part of town to mass-murder African Americans.

We're inundated with propaganda that "millennials" and "Gen Z" are so much better on social issues than previous generations. It's not true. Look what white conservatism continues to churn out, year after year, decade after decade, and generation on generation.

[carmenjonze]

Silent by its nature is private.

It is so useful to actually read the opinion. Illuminating and rife with facts.

“ The contested exercise before us does not involve lead- ing prayers with the team or before any other captive audi- ence. Mr. Kennedy’s “religious beliefs do not require [him] to lead any prayer . . . involving students.” Id., at 170. At the District’s request, he voluntarily discontinued the school tradition of locker-room prayers and his postgame religious talks to students. The District disciplined him only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his players after three games in October 2015. ”

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/2 ... 8_i425.pdf

Silent and Private.

None of those pictures apply to the case before the court your majesty.

Your problem is that you're going to have to apply whatever warped logic the SCOTUS applied to this guy, to the religions you hate. Can't wait to watch you contort yourself into knots trying to weasel your way out of doing so.

You will have to apply it to the Muslim coach who prays 3 or 5 times a day facing Mecca.

You will have to apply it to the Church of Satan and Temple of Set coaches who are stuck praying in their office because they got caught trying to groom student athletes into Satanism on the 50 yard line.

You will have to apply it to the Church of Scientology and Moonie coaches praying in their own private silent place. (But then, we already know you selectively defend Moonie cult extremism when it suits your political agenda. viewtopic.php?t=795 .)

You will have to apply it to the Christian pro-abortion and pro-LGBTQ coaches who attend normal churches and perhaps even teach Sunday School, with all those rainbow flags in their office.

I'll be glad to watch you do it, too.

[ProfX]

Much like I read the Talmud, I enjoy reading both the concurring and dissenting opinions of SCOTUS. (OK. I rarely read the Talmud. )

I read both in this case. Both contain highly relevant facts.

Here is Justice Sotomayor's dissent.
https://ballotpedia.org/Kennedy_v._Brem ... l_District

This case is about whether a public school must permit a school official to kneel, bow his head, and say a prayer at the center of a school event. The Constitution does not authorize, let alone require, public schools to embrace this conduct. Since Engel v. Vitale, 370 U. S. 421 (1962), this Court consistently has recognized that school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible. Official-led prayer strikes at the core of our constitutional protections for the religious liberty of students and their parents, as embodied in both the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.

The Court now charts a different path, yet again paying almost exclusive attention to the Free Exercise Clause’s protection for individual religious exercise while giving short shrift to the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on state establishment of religion. See Carson v. Makin, 596 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) (BREYER, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 1). To the degree the Court portrays petitioner Joseph Kennedy’s prayers as private and quiet, it misconstrues the facts. The record reveals that Kennedy had a longstanding practice of conducting demonstrative prayers on the 50- yard line of the football field. Kennedy consistently invited others to join his prayers and for years led student athletes in prayer at the same time and location. The Court ignores this history. The Court also ignores the severe disruption to school events caused by Kennedy’s conduct, viewing it as irrelevant because the Bremerton School District (District) stated that it was suspending Kennedy to avoid it being viewed as endorsing religion. Under the Court’s analysis, presumably this would be a different case if the District had cited Kennedy’s repeated disruptions of school programming and violations of school policy regarding public access to the field as grounds for suspending him. As the District did not articulate those grounds, the Court assesses only the District’s Establishment Clause concerns. It errs by assessing them divorced from the context and history of Kennedy’s prayer practice.

Today’s decision goes beyond merely misreading the record. The Court overrules Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), and calls into question decades of subsequent precedents that it deems “offshoot[s]” of that decision. Ante, at 22. In the process, the Court rejects longstanding concerns surrounding government endorsement of religion and replaces the standard for reviewing such questions with a new “history and tradition” test. In addition, while the Court reaffirms that the Establishment Clause prohibits the government from coercing participation in religious exercise, it applies a nearly toothless version of the coercion analysis, failing to acknowledge the unique pressures faced by students when participating in school-sponsored activities. This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our Nation’s longstanding commitment to the separation of church and state. I respectfully dissent.[5]

[snip][end]

Bravissima.

[ProfX]

Supreme Court Lets Public Schools Coerce Students Into Practicing Christianity
The conservative supermajority continues to repeal the separation of church and state.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... chool.html

[snip]

Joseph Kennedy, the plaintiff in Monday’s case, worked as a football coach at a public high school in Washington State. In 2008, he began reciting Christian prayers at the 50-yard line after games, allowing students to join him. Eventually, a majority of the team consistently formed a prayer circle with their coach. During these invocations, Kennedy would lift a helmet while kneeling students surrounded him. He also led Christian prayers in the locker room before games. In 2015, the school district learned of this practice and asked Kennedy to stop, asserting that his conduct violated the First Amendment’s establishment clause (which bars the government from “respecting an establishment of religion”). The district noted that non-Christian students could be alienated by his behavior and asked him to pray privately, or while he was off-duty.

[snip]

Kennedy refused. Instead, he hired a team of far-right lawyers and fomented a media firestorm, framing himself as a martyr facing oppression from anti-Christian secularists. The coach continued to kneel in prayer after games, and even students who hadn’t played would race onto the field to join; after one game, zealous students created a “stampede” that injured several classmates. Parents informed the district that their children only joined the prayer circles for fear of being ostracized or denied playing time. Finally, exasperated school officials placed Kennedy on paid administrative leave, and when his contract expired at the end of the season, he did not reapply. He then filed a lawsuit alleging a violation of the First Amendment rights to free speech and free exercise.

[snip]

For decades, conservative judges have criticized this rule as unjustifiably hostile toward religion in the public square. Now they have prevailed: In his opinion for the court, Gorsuch overruled Lemon as well as its “offshoot,” the endorsement test, wiping out dozens of precedents in one fell swoop. With remarkable mendacity, the justice actually claimed that the court had already overruled these cases, citing a series of concurrences and dissents. (He disregarded defenses of these tests as a useful gauge of a law’s purpose and effect on religion.) Gorsuch replaced the test with a novel, amorphous standard: The establishment clause, he asserted, must be interpreted with “reference to historical practices and understandings,” by asking what “the Founding Fathers” would have thought. Once again, the Supreme Court has compelled judges to become amateur historians, substituting bright-line legal standards for mushy and subjective appeals to “tradition.”

Previously, the Supreme Court was sensitive to the “subtle coercive pressure” that school officials exert when practicing their faith alongside their students. No longer.

[snip]

This claim requires a heroic suspension of disbelief. In 2006’s notorious Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court’s conservatives held that government employees have no free speech rights while performing their official duties. Kennedy was obviously in the midst of his official duties when he kneeled on the field, in uniform, responsible for the conduct of his students. And when he led his prayer circles, he was not “quiet,” but loud and prominent by design. His expression was a quintessential example of on-the-job “government speech” that, according to Garcetti, falls outside the First Amendment.

To reach his conclusion, Gorsuch simply rewrote the facts. In his account, Kennedy had been suspended exclusively for his silent prayer—not the spectacle he created by hijacking football games with prayer circles. And because this prayer was allegedly so “quiet,” it qualified as “private” expression shielded by the First Amendment. The coach’s prayer, Gorsuch insisted, was “not delivered as an address to the team, but instead in his capacity as a private citizen.” So even though he was in the middle of a field that he could only access because he was performing his job responsibilities, his speech bore no imprint of government approval, and was totally unconnected to his work as a coach. (*)

As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, Gorsuch’s “myopic framing” contradicts precedent that requires courts to assess the “taint” of “past practice,” because “reasonable observers have reasonable memories.” To promote its preferred narrative, the court had to ignore Kennedy’s “years of inappropriately leading students in prayer in the same spot, at that same time, and in the same manner.” Sotomayor also criticized the majority’s whole repudiation of Lemon, the endorsement test, and the “reasonable observer” standard. But she pointed out that the opinion goes further than that: It also defanged the very heart of establishment clause jurisprudence, the principle that states may not coerce individuals into worship. “The coercive pressures” of Kennedy’s conduct were “obvious”; even Justice Brett Kavanaugh acknowledged during oral arguments that students might fear retaliation if they did not join. In case there was any doubt, students did come forward to attest that they felt coerced into prayer.

[snip][end]

(*) I like to call this "peeing on my leg, and telling me it's rain".

[Libertas]

all cons support this unconstitutional bullshit, of course...and like Thomas who was quoted in a new book about him that since Americans spend so much time on the iPhones he might as well destroy our rights...he didnt say the last part, it was just clearly implied.