It's not about you having the right to express your commitment to your imaginary friends. It's about some kid who will eventually get beat up for not having the "right" religiousness, or for resisting the pressure outright, or for stating his own belief that there is no god.
We know it's going to happen because it's been happening for more than 20 centuries.
By looking the other way while a school district employee passive-aggressively proselytizes kids, the administration puts its imprimatur on the establishment of religion.
There's a rule against that, and SCOTUS just chipped away at it.
'Beyond shameful': Legal experts slam Neil Gorsuch for using 'flat-out, knowing lie' in SCOTUS ruling
Many people from legal experts to court watchers to journalists to ordinary Americans on social media are criticizing Justice Neil Gorsuch for his majority opinion in a decision siding with a former high school football coach. That coach sued after the school district ordered him to stop praying after every game at the 50-yard line. Justice Gorsuch’s opinion, as many are noticing, appears to be based on facts that are false. Several are accusing Gorsuch of just plain lying.
Justice Gorsuch claimed the coach’s First Amendment rights were violated, and that he was merely engaging in “quiet personal prayer” as he knelt.
Gorsuch uses the word “quiet” 14 times, as The Washington Post’s Paul Waldman notes.
“Joseph Kennedy lost his job as a high school football coach because he knelt at midfield after games to offer a quiet prayer of thanks,” Justice Gorsuch writes as he begins his majority opinion. “Mr. Kennedy prayed during a period when school employees were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters. He offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied. Still, the Bremerton School District disciplined him anyway. It did so because it thought anything less could lead a reasonable observer to conclude (mistakenly) that it endorsed Mr. Kennedy’s religious beliefs. That reasoning was misguided.”
“The contested exercise here does not involve leading prayers with the team,” Gorsuch continues (despite photos that appear to suggest otherwise), “the District disciplined Mr. Kennedy only for his decision to persist in praying quietly without his students after three games in October 2015.”
These are the photos of Coach Kennedy that Justice Sonia Sotomayor included in her dissent:
“They aren’t even trying to use reason anymore,” former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade laments:
And Vox’s Ian Millhiser makes clear what just happened: “The Supreme Court hands the religious right a big victory by lying about the facts of a case.”
Calling the decision “a big victory for the religious right,” Millhiser writes that’s “only because Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of the case.”
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Bring on the Satanic Temple.
- The US government has recognized the Satanic Temple as a tax-exempt organized religion.
- The Satanic temple is a non-theistic religious group.
- It is based out of Salem, Massachusetts, but it has branches across the US and world.
- Founded in 2013, it has roots in political activism.
- It is different from the Church of Satan.
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