A high school football coach who was fired for praying with students at games will return to the gridiron four months after the Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in his favor.
Joe Kennedy will be reinstated as the head coach of the Bremerton High School football team in Washington state, according to court documents filed Tuesday. The filing comes after the Supreme Court in June ruled 6-3 on ideological lines that the school district had violated his right to exercise his religion freely when it fired him for praying after football games.
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Kennedy was first relieved of his duties as head coach in 2015. He sued, claiming that Bremerton School District had fired him in violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of religion, beginning a protracted legal battle with the district that culminated with the June high court’s ruling in his favor.
“Respect for religious expressions is indispensable to life in a free and diverse Republic — whether those expressions take place in a sanctuary or on a field, and whether they manifest through the spoken word or a bowed head,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion. “Here, a government entity sought to punish an individual for engaging in a brief, quiet, personal religious observance doubly protected by the Free Exercise and Free Speech Clauses of the First Amendment. And the only meaningful justification the government offered for its reprisal rested on a mistaken view that it had a duty to ferret out and suppress religious observances even as it allows comparable secular speech.”
The Tuesday filing says Kennedy will be reinstated as head coach of the team no later than March 15, 2023, and contains a clause that says, “Bremerton School District shall not interfere with or prohibit Kennedy from offering a prayer consistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s opinion.”
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In a statement to the Washington Examiner, Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty Institute, the legal group representing Kennedy, said the organization was “glad” the district would be reinstating Kennedy.
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“Since the Supreme Court released its decision in June, it was inevitable that Coach Kennedy would be back on the field,” Dys said. “We’re glad that the school district has agreed that by March 15, 2023, he’ll be back to coaching, just like he wanted when he filed the lawsuit.”
