Supreme Court Takes ‘Wrecking Ball’ to Separation of Church and State With Prayer Ruling

A U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Monday offered “another example” of the court’s “conservative supermajority continuing its politicized agenda,” said the head of one of the nation’s largest teachers’ unions as the decision overturned decades of precedent which prohibited educators from leading students in religious displays.

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, which concerned a coach who led prayers on the 50-yard line of a Washington state high school’s football field, the court’s right-wing majority ruled that the coach’s prayers were protected under the First Amendment and that school officials who asked him to stop were not acting in the interest of the nation’s bedrock laws separating church and state.

The three liberal justices dissented, saying “the court now charts a different path” after decades of affirming that “school officials leading prayer is constitutionally impermissible.”

“This decision does a disservice to schools and the young citizens they serve, as well as to our nation’s long-standing commitment to the separation of church and state,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in the minority opinion.

The decision comes just two decades after the court reaffirmed that prayer in schools violated the separation of church and state, ruling in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Department of Education in 2000.

Observers noted that the case was complicated by the fact that lawyers for Joe Kennedy, who coached football in Bremerton, Washington, claimed Kennedy prayed privately and silently despite the fact that a photo included in Sotomayor’s opinion showed the coach leading students in prayer.

Last year, a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found that Kennedy’s lawyers had created “a deceitful narrative” about the case, which the six right-wing justices accepted Monday.

Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. of the Ninth Circuit found that Kennedy “prayed out loud in the middle of the football field… 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.”

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s team claimed the coach “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied,” as the majority wrote in its opinion Monday.

“One of the amazing things about the Coach Kennedy case, which has rendered the establishment clause’s separation of church and state basically moot, is that to accomplish this the majority embraced a version of the facts that’s demonstrably false,” said Guardian columnist Moira Donegan.

The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW) noted that the Kennedy ruling represents the third time this term that the Supreme Court has “deeply undermined constitutional law regarding church-state separation.”

“As Jews in America, we know intimately that religion-state separation is essential to our ability to live and thrive,” said Jody Rabhan, chief policy officer for the NCJW.

Originally published at Commondreams.org, written by Julia Conley.