The Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on Monday, overruling a 1971 case laying out how the government must keep its distance from religion.

But Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion for himself and his fellow Republican appointees relies on a bizarre misrepresentation of the case’s facts. He repeatedly claims that Joseph Kennedy, a former public school football coach at Bremerton High School in Washington state who ostentatiously prayed at the 50-yard line following football games — often joined by his players, members of the opposing team, and members of the general public — “offered his prayers quietly while his students were otherwise occupied.”

(Justice Brett Kavanaugh did not join a brief section of Gorsuch’s opinion concerning the Constitution’s free speech protections, but Gorsuch otherwise spoke for the Court’s entire Republican majority.)

Because Gorsuch misrepresents the facts of this case, it’s hard to assess many of its implications.

But it’s not clear how those lower court judges should now navigate questions about the separation of church and state. Although the Court overrules Lemon, it does not announce a fleshed-out test that will replace Lemon. Instead, Kennedy announces a vague new rule that “the Establishment Clause must be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings.’”

Moreover, because Gorsuch’s opinion relies so heavily on false facts, the Court does not actually decide what the Constitution has to say about a coach who ostentatiously prays in the presence of students and the public. Instead, it decides a fabricated case about a coach who merely engaged in “private” and “quiet” prayer.

Within minutes of the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade on Friday, the attorney general in Missouri issued an opinion banning abortion in his state. Abortion clinics in several cities, including Montgomery, Alabama, and Sioux Falls, South Dakota, shut down. But others in Illinois and Ohio kept seeing patients.

At a Phoenix clinic, 40 women were waiting to schedule appointments, setting the staff scrambling for answers about whether it was still allowed to perform abortions. “We sent a bunch of people home, and they were hysterical,” said Dr. Gabrielle Goodrick, the clinic’s owner.

David Ripley, the director of Idaho Chooses Life, said he did not think he would be alive to see the day when Idaho’s trigger ban on abortion — making it illegal upon Roe’s fall — would actually take effect.

“The court has finally admitted that its ruling and the rulings of the federal courts for the last 50 years have been egregiously wrong,” Ripley said. “I am ecstatic.”

On the other side, supporters of abortion rights worried for the millions of women living in the wide swath of the country where abortion will be illegal or essentially unavailable because of layers of restrictions that have added expense and delays for women seeking the procedure.

In Conway, Arkansas, Stacey Margaret Jones, 52, said she kept thinking about the women she encountered when she volunteered at Planned Parenthood.

“I feel really hopeless because I feel like there’s nothing I could have personally done differently,” Jones said. She has donated to candidates who support abortion rights, attended marches and written to her legislators. But in a conservative state like Arkansas, she does not feel like her voice is heard. Her state senator is Jason Rapert, a lead sponsor of Arkansas’ trigger law that outlawed abortion Friday.

“I’m looking for guidance from somebody or some organization to say, ‘OK, we knew this could happen and this is what we’re going to do,’” Jones said.

Troy Newman, the president of Kansas-based Operation Rescue, which staged a long campaign of blockades outside abortion clinics, said the decision still left too much latitude for states like his, largely led by Democrats, to allow abortion.

“It is now time for the pro-life movement to pull up our big-boy boots and win the rest of the states,” he said. “We will be mopping up, putting the remaining dirty, disgusting abortion mills out of business.”

Jay Willis
@jaywillis

Supreme Court dissents are generally worth as much as the paper they're written on, but I am glad that in Dobbs the liberals skipped the Rule of Law boilerplate and just talked about the Court as the glorified numbers game that it is https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/dobbs-s