Supreme Court Uses Praying Football Coach to Gut Separation of Church and State

[Nevilledog]

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The Daily Beast
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"In short, what you’re willfully ignoring is power, Justice Gorsuch. Your group has it, and mine (Jews, LGBTQ folks, etc.) do not. What you describe as discrimination, I experience as protection," writes @jaymichaelson

thedailybeast.com
Supreme Court Uses Praying Football Coach to Gut Separation of Church and State
Justice Gorsuch again ignores the Establishment Clause, depicting a proselytizing state employee as a humble victim of secularism.
10:40 AM · Jun 27, 2022

https://www.thedailybeast.com/neil-gorsuch-ruling-on-kennedy-v-bremerton-school-district-attacks-church-state-divide/

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*snip*

Which, really, is what conservatives’ “originalism” has always been about: not interpreting some textual provision, but making progress impossible. Conservatives say that liberal judges are inventing too many rights—like, say, the right to watch a football game without being proselytized to by the majority religion, or the right to control one’s own body, or the right to be protected from an AR-15 wielded by a teenager. So they slam the door on interpreting the Constitution in all but the most limited ways.

Meanwhile, wrapped up in their Christian Nationalist fever dream of a “war on religion,” the Court’s religious majority advances the actual war waged by religious extremists against the Constitution itself. The victims of Dobbs are not the clumps of cells removed from pregnant women; they are the women whose bodies are controlled by the religious beliefs of conservative governments. The victims of the Court’s line of COVID cases were not religious people forced to wear a mask in church, but communities that suffered under the spread of the lethal pandemic. The victims of the Court’s religious exemption cases were not the Christian business owners who can’t bring themselves to sell a gay couple a wedding cake or offer contraception insurance to women, but the women and the LGBTQ people who learned just where power still lies in this country.

And here, of course, the victim is not Coach Kennedy, who is already a well-subsidized and much-praised hero of the Christian Right, but the kids forced, if they want to participate in the mainstream of high school society, to listen to his Christian proselytization endorsed and subsidized by taxpayer money. These are kids who may be Muslim, or Jewish, or gay, or atheist, or, for that matter, victims of abuse at the hands of church leaders. (Let’s see how well these guarantees stand up when it’s a Muslim coach offering a ‘voluntary’ Muslim prayer.)

In short, what you’re willfully ignoring is power, Justice Gorsuch. Your group has it, and mine (Jews, LGBTQ folks, etc.) do not. What you describe as discrimination, I experience as protection. Which is what the Constitution was meant to offer to vulnerable populations.

Until you and your colleagues began dismantling it.

*snip*

[onecaliberal]

1. Tax the church now.

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

[hauckeye]

3. Isn't that coach going against Jesus's teaching?

Wasn’t there something about not praying in public in a big show but doing it quietly in your room?

[Lovie777]

4. Christianity is not the only religion here in the USA .......

this will allow other religions concerning sport events to pray for whatever religion they want to. So, if the coach want to pray to Ali, so be it. Now, the 6 fucked up justices may want to make Christianity the only religion in the USA but like Roe vs. Wade and other fucked up decisions they continue to do, the USA citizens will not appreciate this shit as the Republicans wish list is for one party (dictatorship) I think that will backfire greatly.

[Totally Tunsie]

5. Should be more concerned with PREYing coaches...

just sayin'.

[UTUSN]

6. K&R - will the kids be able to REFUSE? What about his POWER over them?