Supreme Court precedent has been clear for many years about prayer in public schools: You can't do it in any way that effectively coerces students into participating. Coaches who lead team prayers on the field are very much included in this.
Until now. So pray away, coaches. It's a new day in Supreme Court land.
This is an athletic event
Athletics is a voluntary extra curricular activity
So long as the coach is not forcing ALL Student athletes to pray I don't have a problem with it
"The Supreme Court on Monday ruled for a former high school football coach who lost his job after leading postgame prayers at midfield"
Post game prayers
Kinda like a hand shake between opposing teams AFTER the game is over
So long as it's not a requirement ? Pray if you want to. AFTER the game
Yeah....
Going out to the 50 yard line and making it a spectacle, as was done, mutes your point.
"Letting" students participate certainly wouldn't give those showing up a leg up....right...
Just think what would have happened if someone laid out a prayer rug and bowed to Mecca....
I got not problem with any religion golack
We don't know if the coach forced the students to do the same do we?
If a prayer rug was brought out and the coach had a fit over it then yeah fire his discriminatory ass for doing so.
In many ways middle eastern religions are MORE conservative than Christian ones are. How many women in congress dress as conservatively as Ilhan Omar does? This is one thing Judeo-Christians are very hypocritical about.
Oddly enough since the majority of people here in America believe in hte legality of abortion - with restrictions - its interesting to no this coincides with Muslim beliefs rather closely
"No Muslim-majority country bans abortion in the case of the mother's life being at risk. Other reasons that are permitted by certain Muslim-majority countries include preserving a woman's physical or mental health, fetal impairment, cases of incest or rape, and social or economic reasons"
I clearly don't see a reason why we Christians react so strongly against other religions. jealousy may?
“Nobody forced young women to participate in sex with Harvey Weinstein… but the ones that did got more prominent acting roles. Funny that.”
In 10 years: “Nobody forced young athletes to join the coach in prayer, but the ones that did got more playing time, and better collegiate prospects. Funny that.”
Same could be said if the coach ran a book club. Should he not be able to do that because someone somewhere has a fear that the kids that attend the book club will get more playing time?
The coach is favoring his religious beliefs over others while acting as an agent of the local government. The 1st amendment if read by a sane honest person would see that as the county school favoring one religion over another. The Supremes don't care because it happens to be their sky god and not the sky god of another sect.
I guarantee you, once Muslims want to roll out rugs and turn to Mecca to pray up to six times a day during business hours, stopping their ringing up of customers or teaching or whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing… employers aren’t going to be cool with it and SCOTUS will side with the employers then.
Will they?
Will they then ADMIT that freedom from religion is only geared towards Christianity?
At that point our constitution will become worthless
As would our court system
We know that, but so do they
Fuck off ALL CAPS troll.
If you read up no the case the school district tolerated the guy's behavior until the football games became a real spectacle with crowds climbing fences and getting hurt along with the Satanists showing up at games to offer their alternative prayers.
I'm going to guess that the Satanists will be appearing at the schools football games again in light of this ruling.
I hope they do.
Folks who participated in organized youth sports can confirm this, but there is a significant coercive factor if your coach (who controls your position on the team and playing time) is praying in public after each game, and is joined by practically the whole team. There is no way I would have stood up for this if this happened to my son on any of his soccer teams, including HS Varsity. My kid, had a Bar Mitzvah, should not be coerced into participating in such religious activates in a secular setting. Similarly, it was wrong that in third grade (early 1960's) NYC public schools, we were singing "oh come all ye faithful" in class. I simply did not tell my parents about this. I especially enjoyed the line "Christ is the Lord" prior to heading out to Hebrew School in the after class.
The SCOTUS Theocrats have no idea about this since they mostly went to Parochial School. I am sure that if there is a similar care whereby a teacher/coach gets fired for praying to Satan, those fucking hypocrites will find some BS twisted rational for agreeing with such firing.
KJK, it's funny you should give that example because it is almost precisely the example you give that changed my mind in a NY state public school in the early 60's. I was raised in a nominally Christian household - I say nominally because my parents were actually agnostics and we stopped going to church or Sunday school when I was about 6. Nevertheless we celebrated Christmas at home and I enjoyed singing carols in school when Christmas came around. But when I was about 10 I had a Jewish friend explain to me why singing Christian songs in school was difficult for him and I've never been able to refute his logic in the intervening nearly 60 years. And singing them after school in "voluntary" choir practice, contra Vog46, does not change his logic.
My mom never forgot being forced to pray the protestant version of the Lord's Prayer in 1930s New Jersey public schools, also bible readings but not the Catholic bible of course. Her mom was livid and as soon as they could afford to, they sent my mom to the local parish school.
All but 2 Justices had Catholic education - it most certainly has skewed the court's philosophy for the worse.
That's a really bad inference to make. Six of those seven were chosen for the court because they had been suitably indoctrinated as conservative Republicans; their Catholic backgrounds only helped signal that they were on the anti-Roe side. Catholic schools have turned out plenty of other people, like Sonia Sotomayor, who wouldn't have fit the Republican mold.
That's a really bad inference to make. Six of those seven were chosen for the court because they had been suitably indoctrinated as conservative Republicans...
Moreover the Catholic electorate is far less loyal to the GOP than its Evangelical counterpart. Catholics vote like the country as a whole. Evangelicals are the MAGA/GOP's base.
My sense is the prominence of Catholic right wingers in the GOP-appointed judiciary flows from that group's greater emphasis on academic achievement, and so Catholics in right wing circles (as opposed to Evangelical Protestants) are disproportionately represented among the ranks of those with fancy law school JDs. I'm sure the GOP would only be too happy to tap Jewish right wingers for similar reasons, but not enough can be found, given the pronounced leftwards ideological tilt of Jewish Americans.
When I was in public school we sang Christmas carols. I remember singing Silent Night about the baby being “tender and mild” and becoming sick in the stomach because I thought they ate him.
That's what Catholics call transubstantiation, though calling it mild is to overstate the flavor by several orders of magnitude.
Look, I can go to church on Sunday and no one is forcing me to say any of the prayers. It's still religious indoctrination. Of course, I go to church voluntarily in the first place, but what if I was waiting at the driver services facility and a religious service started up? Led by a state official? Well, I could put some earphones in and tune it out, or tell them I'd be waiting outside, or maybe I could come in at a different time. But don't you see that kind of thing as going against the First Amendment?
I've only glanced at the reportage, so, my initial reaction might be that I'm personally not going to get too worked about a football coach and some students praying (though I'm not a fan of showy displays of religiosity in a non-sectarian setting. Jesus Christ himself advocated praying in one's room with the door closed!).
However, what angers me about this court decision—and the general line of Establishment Clause jurisprudence emanating from the right of late—is the new standard whereby governmental units that favor a strict(ish) standard with respect to separation of church/state—and the voters who elect them—are prohibited from operating accordingly.
In a diverse nation of a third of a billion souls, I understand that standards and preferences are going to vary. Maybe it's not a crisis if rural Oklahomans aren't as meticulous with respect to church-state issues as residents of Seattle or New York. But this new right wing trend won't allow the more secular-oriented parts of the country to practice the eminently reasonable policy of scrupulous church-state separation. I don't know that I believe the first amendment requires a blue-state-style, robustly secular approach in all things related to the public sector. But I do believe the view that said amendment prohibits such an approach is madness.
Simple good government best practices 101 ought to be justification enough (I mean, is the avoidance of indoctrination of children in taxpayer-funded schools really an unacceptable goal?). Moreover, the six rightists seem to have forgotten that the central purpose of the Establishment Clause itself was religious liberty: such judicial outcomes undermine the very freedom they purport to advance.
So what if it's extra curricular and voluntary ? It's a publicly funded school activity and anyone who wants to play should be allowed to without being subjected to the coach using his position of authority to embarrass students who do not follow him out to midfield to pray before, during or after the game.
'So long as the coach is not forcing ALL Student athletes to pray I don't have a problem with it' . That's ridiculous. Would it be ok with you if a teacher
knelt down an prayed before every class and encouraged anyone who wanted to join them to come to the front of the class and join hands and pray with them ?
This is no different.
Over at MaddowBlog, they noted that the NYT referred to the Justices and "pro-religion".
I can not think of a more anti-religion thing to do.
If you want to destroy religion, entangle it with the state.
And visa versa
I totally agree.
These guys are gonna eat the whole bag of Halloween (ironic, no?) candy, aren’t they?
Kevin-
You are missing the point here
The court is laying out HOW to fight, in court over certain things
Lets take another view on athletics at the collegiate level
You got your big schools with large TV contracts to broadcast games. They fund the student athletic program almost in its' entierty
Then you have schools like my local on UNC - Wilmington that has to rely on fees levied against ALL students so that the 0.2% of the student population can play sports.
So for those students who want an education versus participating in sports this is taxation without representation. Why should they have to fund them?
"So for those students who want an education versus participating in sports this is taxation without representation. Why should they have to fund them?"
How is that remotely relevant? I may dislike that some fractional amount of my tuition goes to pay for, say, geology labs and professors whose classes I'll never take or the salary of a dean I personally dislike, but that has nothing to do with "taxation without representation" or whether or not a state employee ought to be able to lead a religious ceremony on public property during performance of state employment.
They have done this at college games forever. A irrelevant local event. Not even news worthy.
Read the dissent, which calls out the majority's LIES about facts concerning coercion (among other things). Make no mistake, if there wasn't coercion here, then the only thing that will, in future cases, qualify as coercion is forcing prayer on pain of executing a family member taken hostage (i.e., things that are actually unlawful in and of themselves).
By "prayer", you mean (of course) "fundamentalist christian jesus supplications", right? Not Moslem or even Jewish prayers? No Buddhist meditations? No Native American prayers?
Not to mention worship and praise to the Flying Spaghetti Monster or ... Satan?
Mocking public prayer will make a comeback.
E-6 points out the most disturbing thing about this ruling. It isn't that justices disagree on the law; it's that they can't even agree on the facts.
Best team prayer, from "North Dallas Forty".
https://youtu.be/DCT__l4_m4g?t=78
I haven't read the opinion, but is there a reason the school didn't just close the football field to all non-essential personnel after the game? Students and players have no business being on the field after a game. Even the coach shouldn't be on the field unless he's performing one of his job functions. A football field isn't a church.