The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and is rallying behind a high school football coach, whose case involved his legal challenge after he was suspended because he engaged in 30 seconds of personal prayer at the end of a game.
Together with lead counsel from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, P.C., ADF filed a brief at the U.S. Supreme Court regarding Kennedy v. Bremerton School District on behalf of former and current National Football League players, who support the coach.
The brief reads as follows:
“American citizens do not give up the right to personal prayer when they accept employment with a public employer. As our brief explains, the First Amendment protects prayer because it is private speech, not government speech. Ignoring the Supreme Court’s command that ‘schools do not endorse everything they fail to censor,’ the 9th Circuit wrongly reasoned that Coach Kennedy’s personal, on-field prayers were not his own, but the government’s—and worse, that even if the prayers were his own, the risk that someone might think they were the government’s prayers meant he had to be censored. But the coach’s prayers were not a part of his official job responsibilities, and if he had instead been saying a silent prayer in the school cafeteria before lunch, no one would have thought of attributing it to the school district. The fact that he prayed after a game doesn’t change the fact that his speech is just as protected by the First Amendment, and we hope the Supreme Court will reverse the 9th Circuit and affirm just that.”
The current and former NFL players represented in the brief are Kirk Cousins, Joe DeLamielleure, Nick Foles, Phil Olsen, Christian Ponder, Drew Stanton, Harry Swayne, and Jack Youngblood.
The Other Side
In contrast, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, which represents the Bremerton School District in Kennedy v. Bremerton, celebrated a “broad and diverse coalition of organizations and individuals who filed amicus briefs this week with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of the public school district’s decision to stop a coach who violated the religious freedom of students when he pressured them to join his public prayers at the 50-yard line at public high school football games.”
“Today, dozens of organizations and people that represent religious, education, sports, civil rights and religious freedom communities joined us in fighting to protect students’, and everyone’s, First Amendment rights,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United. “The diversity of this coalition demonstrates the widespread approval for the bedrock constitutional principle of church-state separation. The facts of the case, the laws of our country, and the majority of Americans are on the side of protecting students’ religious freedom.”
Chris Kluwe, a retired NFL punter and current high school football coach, added that “every football player is conditioned to view his team as a family that sticks together no matter what. And the coach is unquestionably the head of that family. The coach has the power to decide whether kids get to play and has influence over how they get along with teammates. It’s deeply wrong for any coach to put high school students in the position of turning their backs on the team family if they don’t want to join the coach’s very public prayers on the 50-yard line after games. That’s why the law is so clear that coaches, as authority figures, cannot and should not compel athletes under their care to engage in prayer, either explicitly or implicitly.”
