It's Sunday

And speaking of lying justices.

[T]he Supreme Court has removed foundational, decades-old constitutional limits on religion in public schools. Its Monday decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District overruled a half-century of precedent to elevate the rights of public school officials over students. The ruling will allow these officials to engage in coercive sectarian prayer on the job. Justice Neil Gorsuch’s 6–3 decision is another maximalist attack on the separation of church and state, stripping students of their First Amendment freedom against religious indoctrination. His opinion also embraces a false narrative of faith-based persecution, illustrating yet again that this court will manipulate facts to reach its desired outcome.

[...]

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.

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.

[...]

Under precedent that existed until Monday, Kennedy’s lawsuit was frivolous. The Supreme Court has long held that the establishment clause outlaws the recitation of prayer in public school. It has forbidden prayer at graduation ceremonies and football games, explaining that schools must avoid “state endorsement” of religion and religious “coercion” of students.

[...]

With remarkable mendacity, [Gorsuch] actually claimed that the court had already overruled these cases, citing a series of concurrences and dissents.

[...]

Gorsuch then declared that Bremerton School District violated Kennedy’s free speech and free exercise rights by asking him to pray privately or off-the-job. [...] Moreover, Gorsuch argued that the policy impermissibly suppressed Kennedy’s speech, because it was “quiet” and therefore not made “pursuant to his official duties.”

This claim requires a heroic suspension of disbelief. [...] 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.

[...]

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.”

[...]

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.”

[...]

After Kennedy, what remains of the 60-year bar on prayer in public schools? Can a district bar teachers from praying at the start of class and inviting (but not formally requiring) students to participate? How about a principal at the start of an assembly? School districts will likely be too fearful of a lawsuit to limit this conduct. After all, any teacher who’s told not to pray can now launch a lawsuit that may take years, and millions of dollars, to litigate—all the while turning themselves into a cause célèbre.

[...]

The roughly 5,000 students in Bremerton School District practice dozens of different faiths. Yet Gorsuch evinced no concern for the religious liberty of Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists who may now be subjected to thinly veiled pressure to practice Christianity at school. These students do not matter to the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. Reading Kennedy with last week’s decision forcing Maine to fund private sectarian schools, a principle emerges: Under the guise of defending religious freedom, Christians have a First Amendment right to impose their faith on the rest of us.
  Slate

Gorsuch should be impeached.

.....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE 09/08/2023: