The story of the praying Bremerton coach keeps getting more surreal

[GMDino]

The story of the coach who said he was fired over leading a prayer is more interesting than I thought.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-story-of-the-praying-bremerton-coach-keeps-getting-more-surreal/

He wasn't fired, the SC seems to have not decided the case on the actual facts but on the agenda, and he seems to only have used the case to enrich himself on the speaking circuit.

Quote: 
By 
Danny Westneat [/url]
Seattle Times columnist


When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that Bremerton assistant football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray on the field, it wasn’t widely understood then that the court had also ordered the school district to give him his job back.

The day of the ruling, Fox News host Sean Hannity expressed doubts the district would follow through. But one of Kennedy’s lawyers clarified that they had no choice: “We’re ready to have that fight. If they want to defy the Supreme Court, I think they’re gonna realize they made a serious mistake.”

Kennedy was sunnier about it all.

“As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight,” he said.

So the school district has been flummoxed about what’s happened since. They complied by offering to reinstate him, they say, and now the football season is in full swing. But Kennedy is nowhere near the sidelines.

“He’s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call,” says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools.

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee [url=https://www.facebook.com/supportcoachkennedy/photos/a.1647146798894979/3289597531316556]being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.

The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.

Coming up this month, Kennedy’s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.

“Place a PR/Publicity Request,” invites his personal website, where he’s known as Coach Joe.
It’s an increasingly surreal situation for the Bremerton schools. They were ordered to “reinstate Coach Kennedy to a football coaching position,” according to court documents. But the now-famous coach is out on the conservative celebrity circuit, continuing to tell a story about “the prayer that got me fired” — even though Bremerton never actually fired him.

In 2015, he was put on paid leave near the end of the season after holding a series of prayer sessions on the field with students and state legislators. He still got paid for his full assistant coach contract, about $5,000. High school assistants often work on yearly deals, and Kennedy, at odds with the head coach and aggrieved by what had happened, never reapplied to work the 2016 season.

“He was not terminated,” Bevers said. The head coach at the time had moved on, as did most of the coaching staff.

This did not stop Kennedy’s lawyers from telling the Supreme Court repeatedly that he was fired.

“The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,” lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words “fired,” “fire” or “firing” were used 16 times in the hour and a half session.

It wasn’t true though. The district’s lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail.
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“You can’t sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn’t apply,” one lawyer, Mercer Island’s Michael Tierney, argued during a lower court session. “The District didn’t get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn’t fail to rehire him.”

The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact — along with a host of others. At one point during oral arguments, as a different school district attorney was saying the narrative that had been spun didn’t fit with the facts — that the coach’s prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired — Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying “I know that you want to make this very complicated.”

Alito persisted in asking about the coach being fired — six times he said it, to the point that the lawyer finally corrected him. Which is a touchy thing to do with a Supreme Court justice.

“It’s not a question of firing, and in fact, he was put on paid leave,” the lawyer pleaded, fruitlessly, to Alito.
In the end, it all was too complicated. The effect of the court’s order is that Bremerton has to reinstate someone who didn’t apply for the job then and doesn’t appear eager for it now. It’s as if the justices wanted to script an ending for a Christian redemption movie. But real life isn’t cooperating.

What’s left of the case has been sent back to federal court in Seattle. A judge there is overseeing the rehiring issue and also how much in attorneys’ fees the Bremerton schools will pay Kennedy’s lawyers. That judge has given them 60 days to submit more information on both.


By then the football season will be ending. So maybe next year?


“It’s one of many things that has been odd and awkward about this situation,” Bevers said. “But when you’re directed by the U.S. Supreme Court to do something, you do it.”

This past week the Supreme Court justices were hand-wringing in public about why so many people seem to dislike them. The way Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it is that the public is questioning the “legitimacy of the court.” He said people shouldn’t base their views on whether the court’s decisions are popular.

That’s fair enough. The rule of law isn’t supposed to bend with the winds. But Justice Elena Kagan got much closer to the mark.

“I think judges … undermine their legitimacy when they don’t act so much like courts,” she pointedly said this past week. “And when they don’t do things that are recognizably law, and when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process, or where they’re imposing their own personal preferences.”

Your honors, I submit for the record, the Coach Kennedy case. Exhibit A.

[BmorePat87]

(09-18-2022, 08:50 AM)GMDino Wrote: The story of the coach who said he was fired over leading a prayer is more interesting than I thought.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/the-story-of-the-praying-bremerton-coach-keeps-getting-more-surreal/

He wasn't fired, the SC seems to have not decided the case on the actual facts but on the agenda, and he seems to only have used the case to enrich himself on the speaking circuit.

It was a pretty bizarre decision that actively ignored the reality of the facts of the case to help out the good Christian man, though it was also limited in scope to just this specific case, which is good. I'm not surprised that he is going to make bank off of this. 

[GMDino]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/09/supreme-court-praying-coach-joe-kennedy-fake.html

Quote:The Supreme Court’s Fake Praying Coach Case Just Got Faker
BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
[color=hsla(var(--txt-color-hsl),.7)]SEPT 07, 202312:22 PM[/color]

[color=hsla(var(--txt-color-hsl),.85)]“Coach” Joe Kennedy. [color=hsla(var(--txt-color-hsl),.6)]Win McNamee/Getty Images[/color][/color]

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a high school football coach’s right to engage in “brief, quiet, personal” prayer—despite photographic evidence that his prayers were drawn-out, loud, and extremely public. At the time, the decision was embarrassing enough, as it rested on the fiction that the coach, Joe Kennedy, was reprimanded for “private religious expression” when he was actually establishing huge prayer circles in the middle of the field. Since then, the situation has only further exposed the shameful artifice of the ruling. At first, Kennedy appeared to have little interest in taking back his old job, which was supposedly what he was fighting for. Then he acknowledged that he had sold his house and moved across the country, with no plans to move back. Finally, on Friday, Kennedy returned to coach one football game. Then he quit, as the Seattle Times reported on Wednesday. He has no evident desire to exercise the rights that his lawyers fought for over years of litigation. Those lawyers, however, will walk away with $1.775 million in attorneys’ fees, paid out by the school district.

This final chapter of the “Coach Kennedy” saga was foreseeable—inevitable, really—well before the Supreme Court handed down its decision in June 2022. Kennedy has lived in Florida for years, which the court knew but ignored in its race to use his case as a vehicle to expand prayer in public schools. It’s the mirror image of 303 Creative v. Elenis, the big religious freedom case handed down this June, which also rested on allegations that ranged from tenuous to outright bogus. The problem here is simple: Conservative litigators want this Supreme Court to expand a vision of religious liberty that abolishes the separation of church and state while granting Christians a freewheeling right to discriminate, often with public funding.



They are seizing upon any case that will give the court this opportunity, with little concern for the truth of the underlying claims. And the Republican-appointed justices seem eager to twist reality into whatever shape necessary to give them what they want.

If these justices cared to look, they could have forecast the twists that followed their decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. The case was built on a shaky foundation: Kennedy and his lawyers, led by Paul Clement and the far-right First Liberty Institute, alleged that the school district instructed him to stop praying on the field during and after football games, and fired him when he refused. These prayers, he said, were hushed, personal expressions of faith that players were free to join or ignore. In truth, the prayers were a spectacle. Kennedy would gather students around him in a large circle, lift a helmet, and lead them in overtly sectarian prayer; non-Christian players felt coerced into joining, assuming (quite reasonably) that their coach would show favoritism toward those who participated.

This kind of coercive religious conduct strikes at the heart of the First Amendment’s establishment clause, which guards against sectarian indoctrination at public schools. In a 6–3 decision, though, the Supreme Court found that Kennedy’s prayers were protected by the First Amendment’s guarantees of free speech and free exercise. To reach this conclusion, Justice Neil Gorsuch’s majority opinion rewrote the facts, depicting Kennedy’s prayers as fleeting, muted, and unobtrusive. Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent repudiated this lie with pictures of the sprawling prayer circles, which Gorsuch disregarded. He instead embraced what one lower court judge decried as “the Siren song of a deceitful narrative of this case spun by counsel.”

There was, all this time, another huge red flag in Kennedy v. Bremerton: Coach Kennedy said he wanted an injunction forcing the school district to rehire him—but he lived thousands of miles away. Bremerton School District is in Washington State, where Kennedy lived when the case commenced. As it dragged on, though, he sold his home in Washington and relocated to Florida with his wife. When the school district’s lawyers discovered this move, they advised the Supreme Court that the case had become moot, arguing that Kennedy clearly did not want his job back.

[/url]
Kennedy’s lawyers filed an [url=https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/21/21-418/214991/20220225121628411_2022-02-25%20Kennedy%20Response%20to%20Suggestion%20of%20Mootness.pdf]incensed response avowing that their client craved a return to Washington. “He remains ready, willing, and able to return to his job just as soon as his constitutional rights are vindicated. It is really that simple,” they wrote. “The relocation to Florida is not permanent, and Kennedy stands ready, willing, and able to move back to Bremerton as soon as humanly possible should he prevail in this litigation and be permitted to resume his coaching duties.” Indeed, they continued, he is “champing at the bit” to “resume the job he loves.” Attached was a declaration from Kennedy stating that, if he prevailed, he “would return home to Bremerton immediately.” He attested: “I am ready and willing to resume my coaching duties in Bremerton, WA. I can do so within 24 hours of reinstatement, if I am still temporarily residing in Florida.”

By that point, Kennedy had joined the conservative speaking circuit, pivoting away from his coaching career. When a court ordered the school district to rehire him, the Seattle Times’ Danny Westneat reported, they initially did not get a response. While Bremerton students were preparing for a new season of football, Kennedy was meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence. On the night before their first game of the season, he was awarded an engraved rifle at an American Legion convention. Meetings with former President Donald Trump, and later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, crowded his calendar.
 (Kennedy dined with DeSantis but remains loyal to Trump.) And then there was the problem of housing: Kennedy had none in Bremerton, or the state, or the region. When he finally returned for his one and only game last Friday, he crashed at a friend’s place. Kennedy no longer says he is “temporarily residing in Florida”; the Sunshine State is his home. Kennedy’s previous claims otherwise were clearly a total fiction that the court bought lock, stock, and barrel.

It’s all too reminiscent of 303 Creative. In that case, a website designer named Lorie Smith said Colorado’s nondiscrimination law forced her to make wedding websites for same-sex couples—if asked. But she was never asked! Smith’s lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom claimed that one gay couple, Stewart and Mike, indicated some vague interest in engaging her services. They seized upon this allegation as proof that Smith might imminently discriminate, break the law, and face penalties. One day before the decision, though, the New Republic’s Melissa Gira Grant reported that Stewart and Mike do not exist. They were made up. Smith’s entire business, too, had tenuous roots in reality; it seemed to exist largely to serve as a test case for Alliance Defending Freedom. Mission accomplished. None of these deceptions stopped the court’s hard-right supermajority from siding with the web designer.

ADF has a history of relying on shady or fictional clients as an excuse to get into court, as Supreme Court litigator Adam Unikowsky has documented. In 2019, ADF claimed to represent a calligraphy company that refused to make wedding invitations for same-sex couples (though it was never asked). The company emerged shortly before ADF filed a lawsuit on its behalf, and disappeared shortly after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled in its favor. Its website was then taken over by an Indonesian casino. ADF also represented a supposed videography company in Minnesota, Telescope Media Group, that did not want to film weddings for same-sex couples. (You guess it: None ever asked.) In 2019, an appeals court issued a preliminary injunction granting it the right to discriminate.

Rather than throw in the towel, Minnesota decided to pursue its hunch that Telescope Media Group was, essentially, not real. It sought discovery that would, among other things, reveal the company’s origins and ongoing business practices, if they existed. ADF abruptly moved to dismiss the case, stating (for the first time) that Telescope Media had pivoted away from wedding videos (it’s unclear if they ever even filmed one). Minnesota resisted, declaring its intent to test ADF’s “highly fanciful allegations” and prove that the group had taken “advantage of the judicial system” and now wished to “avoid the merits of this case.” ADF was so desperate to dodge discovery that it then moved to dismiss the case with prejudice, formally killing it—despite the fact that ADF had won once and was almost guaranteed to win again. Due to this desperate maneuver, the ADF lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees. This was done, seemingly, to avoid any more facts coming out about the true nature of its client’s business.

We should expect nothing less from the organization that lied so shamelessly about medication abortion in pursuit of a nationwide ban on mifepristone. But we should expect more from the courts, which sided with the fabulists in each of these other cases. The Constitution limits the federal judiciary to live controversies, and the ADF strategy shows one reason why. When interest groups can manufacture cases, they give courts a chance to make sweeping policy announcements with ambiguous applications in the real world. The Supreme Court’s decisions in Kennedy and 303 Creative did not provide meaningful relief to the ostensible plaintiffs. Rather, Kennedy gave the greenlight to more school-sponsored prayer, while 303 Creative rolled back the rights of same-sex couples by denying them equal access to the market.

ADF will now find (or engineer) new clients to push the limits of those rulings. Coach Kennedy moved on from his own litigation long ago, but there’s an endless supply of culture warriors who will gladly serve as the protagonist of ADF’s next fictional case. By playing along with these illusory cases, the Supreme Court shows itself to be an easy mark—or, perhaps, an all- too-willing dupe.

[Luvnit2]

(09-18-2022, 09:28 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: It was a pretty bizarre decision that actively ignored the reality of the facts of the case to help out the good Christian man, though it was also limited in scope to just this specific case, which is good. I'm not surprised that he is going to make bank off of this. 

We live in a world where people are paid for a variety of failures. Lori Lightfoot teaches at Harvard. HRC made millions off of speaking agreements and lectures at Columbia. I think a couple of fired hosts at CNN also are professors at Harvard.

Why shouldn't a man who was suspended and shamed illegally for his religious beliefs get paid? Why can't a coach move on from a school that the Supreme Court found disrespected his religious views?

It is America, people get paid all the time for reasons I don't agree with either.