(TeaParty.org Exclusive) – The Supreme Court has been on a roll lately and it’s making leftists’ heads explode.
The nation’s highest court is about to wrap up its term but just before doing so they made a landmark decision in the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District involving the fundamental American principles of freedom of religion and speech.
In this monumental decision that came Monday, the court ruled in favor of a former high school football coach who dared to pray in public after games and subsequently lost his job over it.
The court’s decision was 6-3 with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing the opinion:
“The Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment protect an individual engaging in a personal religious observance from government reprisal,” the ruling stated, “the Constitution neither mandates nor permits the government to suppress such religious expression.”
Gorsuch was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett with Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagan dissenting.
Honestly, this case should have been a unanimous 9-0 vote. How can any Supreme Court Justice dissent from upholding freedom of religion and speech in America? It’s a scary thought.
The case revolved around Joseph Kennedy, a former high school football coach in the Bremerton School District in Washington state, according to the Legal Information Institute.
Kennedy had a routine of praying after school football games at the 50-yard line and students would sometimes join him. The school asked him to stop in order to prevent a lawsuit because of a violation of the Establishment Clause.
The school asserted that his praying after games violated the Constitution’s prohibition against government endorsed religion. Of course, this is nonsense and Kennedy refused to stop praying and parents and students began to rally around him.
In 2015, Kennedy was let go from his position by school officials, according to ESPN.
This resulted in Kennedy suing the school district, arguing that it violated his First Amendment right of free exercise of religion and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin.
A district court ruled in favor of the school district but Kennedy appealed and the case made its way up to the Supreme Court, resulting in Monday’s landmark decision.
Kennedy has argued that he was praying as a private citizen rather than as a coach and representative of the school district. Therefore, the school’s insistence that he stop praying violated his First Amendment right of freedom of religious expression.
“When the School District fired him for that fleeting religious exercise out of endorsement concerns, it not only violated the First Amendment, but it — it ignored a veritable wall of this Court’s precedents that make clear that a school does not endorse private religious speech just because it fails to censure it,” attorney Paul Clement, of the First Liberty legal organization, argued on Kennedy’s behalf.
Kennedy also said that as a coach and role model for students, seeing him pray as a private citizen can be beneficial without being coercive and that prohibiting such religious conduct is an expression of hostility toward religion.
He also pointed out that the school could have easily avoided a lawsuit based on the Constitution’s Establishment Clause with a simple disclaimer of endorsement.
Meanwhile, the Bremerton school district argued that if the court ruled in favor of Kennedy it would open the door for teachers, coaches and others in school authority to put religious pressure on students at school.
“So, if we lose this case, it would be a radical departure from decades of well-established law protecting students’ religious freedom. We think it would open the door that could be kicked in, in particular in this climate where there’s a real escalation in religious extremists across our country, to allow teachers and coaches to be able to pray again and pressure students to pray in school,” said Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which is the organization that represent Bremerton.
Sotomayor, in her dissent, wrote that the decision gives priority to one person’s religious freedom above all religious freedom though this is absolutely not accurate.
“It elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all,” the dissent read.
Of course, the reaction to the ruling has been largely negative from the left, who despise all things Christian, with journalist Mark Stern claiming that public employees do not have basic free speech rights.
With today's decision, the Supreme Court effectively grants special, heightened First Amendment rights to religious speech, allowing public school teachers to pray on the job while denying most other public employees basic free speech rights. https://t.co/eC9C36Jd5v
— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) June 27, 2022
Many others, however, praised and cheered the ruling as a major win for freedom and speech. Mike Pompeo tweeted that this was a major victory for religious freedom.
Our right to pray – anytime and anywhere – is fundamental. That right was affirmed today at our highest Court in the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision. I am excited to build on this victory and continue securing our inalienable right to religious freedom!
— Mike Pompeo (@mikepompeo) June 27, 2022
“Our right to pray – anytime and anywhere – is fundamental,” former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote in a Twitter post.
“That right was affirmed today at our highest Court in the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision. I am excited to build on this victory and continue securing our inalienable right to religious freedom!”
The Supreme Court got another one right!
Copyright 2022. TeaParty.org
The 3 that dissented are the very type that catered to Madelyn Murray O’Hare when she fought to take religion out of schools. The rights of the minority were more important than the rights of the majority. O’Hare got back 10-fold what she put in since her financial manager was just as self-serving as she was.
This coach did nothing wrong. He didn’t force anyone to pray with him and now Bremerton school district will have no choice but to learn from their stupidity. This started in 2015 and they’ll probably have to pay the coach back pay for 7 years plus legal fees hopefully.
Those three are homo,loving oBama worshippers ..what else can one expect from the leftist trash in our society?