We wrote about it here and talked about it on our live radio program back in October 2015 when Bremerton High School football coach Joe Kennedy was fired for kneeling beside the field for a short private prayer following the game. After both teams had left the field.
Although he had been doing this for a number of years, in 2015 an atheist parent made it an issue.
Coach Joe was told to stop praying.
He didn't stop praying.The school district fired him.
He sued them.
The 9th Circuit Court has now ruled on the appeal of a local court ruling.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 62-page ruling has refused to reinstate the former Bremerton coach.
The 3-judge panel ruled that Kennedy was acting as a teacher, with a duty to the district, students and parents to set an example and "communicate demonstratively" to those groups. The appeals court says Kennedy "took advantage of his position to press his particular views upon impressionable and captive minds before him."
In praying, the court declared he was "preying" on the kids.
Is anyone not aware of how Planned Parenthood "preys" on captive kids through their presence in the classroom and the teaching materials they provide?
The homosexual activist organization Human Rights Campaign also "preys" on these same captive kids in the classroom. Kids who don't get to leave until the bell rings. Or their parents find out what's going on under the guise of education.
And it does have an impact. Gender confusion, by all surveys, is on the rise among young kids who are being indoctrinated by activists in the classroom.
Somehow in our twisted and perverted view of "separation of church and state," it's okay-- no, mandatory-- to indoctrinate kids as young as 4 and 5 about so-called "gender-fluidity"---but not okay to pray on a football field after the players have left the field.
Last week I mentioned another case where an activist teacher led a 5 year old in a "transition" ceremony in the classroom, telling the 5 year old boy's classmates that he is now a girl with a new name.
The activist teacher explained in some length that the biology of your body does not mean you are a boy, or a girl. You are the gender you feel you are.
Although it should be criminal---it's considered education.
Parents reported their little girls came home terrified that they were going to turn into a boy.
Creating gender confusion among children has become a perverted norm.
Activists preying on children under the guise of education has become common place.
Human Rights Campaign and Planned Parenthood are stalking children every day in public classrooms---preying on our children's vulnerabilities.
A coach saying a prayer on that same public property where someone might see him is criminal?
The Seattle Times explains, "As a coach, Kennedy had access to the field that the general public did not have, because he is an employee of the school, his free speech is unprotected."
Over time, some of the Christian players from both teams stayed behind and knelt with Coach Joe for a moment of prayer. Voluntarily. Without any invitation to do so.
Richard Katskee, a DC attorney with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said, "Teachers and coaches don't get to pressure students to pray."
There was no pressure. He and his cohorts know that.
But why then, are teachers, activists and their lawyers allowed to indoctrinate children regarding human sexuality, abortion and gender under the guise of "education" with the blessing of these same guardians of the temple of public education and separation?
The answer is simple.
Christians and conservatives went to sleep at the wheel, while the far Left activists were vigilant in advancing their agenda.
Our Founders clearly understood the relationship between Christianity and this nation.
Last October, when this story about Coach Joe first became public, the National Review wrote an article titled, "Lawless Judges Created an America Where Praying Gets a Man Suspended from His Job."
In the article, David French was livid---righteously so.
He says it's not likely that the lower court (now the appeals court as well) would have ruled against Coach Kennedy "absent two extraordinary, malicious, anti-Christian legal doctrines developed by our lawless courts."
The first, he says, is the "slow but steady perversion of the Establishment Clause---originally intended to bar the establishment of a European-style church---into a hammer wielded against an increasing range of public religious expressions and acknowledgments, even at the expense of American history."
French notes the removable of Ten Commandments monuments as evidence of the anger and rebellion toward the Commandments that contributed so much to the success of this country. He also notes the obsession of removing war memorial crosses.
"And," he said, "God forbid that any high-school student actually see a teacher pray on the job."
Remember, he wrote this in 2015. Since that time we have moved considerably further down the perilous path of loosing our religious liberties and freedoms.
The second malicious legal development, he says, "is a distortion of so-called standing laws that has allowed citizens to sue towns, school districts, and other public entities simply because they are 'offended observers' of religious symbols or religious practices they don't like."
French says:
Essentially, the Supreme Court has carved out an exception to normal rules of standing (which require a plaintiff to establish a concrete harm to their rights) for the special purpose of challenging any government acknowledgment of religion. As a practical matter, this has been one of the most divisive and biased procedural elements yet devised in constitutional law. Under this unique doctrine, a few plaintiffs can undo decades of community consensus and rip apart long-standing traditions — not because they have been coerced in any way but simply because they were “offended” when they heard a public prayer or saw a nativity scene on public land.
If a cross offends a single atheist-tear down the cross.
What about the thousands of others who are offended by it being torn down?
A school employee offers a voluntary prayer---in public view--fire him.
That, however, isn't the establishment of a religion and anyone with an once of common sense knows it. The laws intended to "protect" religious freedom have been perverted to now be used to undermine religious freedom.
French says, "In the world of constitutional common sense, voluntary individual prayer---even in full public view---isn't an 'establishment' of a religion, but the free exercise thereof."
Yet in federal court, the Constitution often takes a backseat to anti-religious dogma, and judge-made "law" provides school districts with the pretext they need to stretch the boundaries of censorship.
While Bremerton's Coach Joe Kennedy considers if he will make a final appeal to the US Supreme Court---which I personally hope he does--we are being called upon to consider how our country can be saved from the tyranny of distorted laws and interpretations of our laws.
Can America be saved?
Is there anything that can bring us together again? And make America great again?
The French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great."
Most all Americans agreed with his observation.
The problem now is that what can bring us together again---make America great again, is the very thing that divides us.
Presidents Wilson and Truman declared "America is a Christian nation."
Christianity is now being purged from our public life. Or used as a wedge to further divide us.
Traditional morality, rooted in Christianity, is being marginalized and discarded because of indifference by millions of people who claim to be "Christian," yet also claim that "religion and politics" don't mix.
The very foundation of our goodness is Christianity. To the degree that Christianity is eliminated, goodness and greatness is lost.
If America is to ever become great again, we must return to the "former things"--- our "first love"---an abiding faith in the fundamental teaching and principles of Christianity.
There is no politician or elected official who can, alone, lead America back to greatness.
There is no political party that can restore America.
Only God can bring this about. We must return to what Francis Schaeffer called a "Christian consensus."
Even those who did not claim a personal Christian faith, understood it was Christian principles and values that made America good and great.
While Wilson and Truman saw America as Christian, Hillary Clinton infamously last year described those who hold to these values as a "basket of deplorable's...racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic...bigots, and altogether irredeemable."
We cannot continue to use the laws created to protect our Christian religious faith and its expression as a bludgeon tool to destroy its expression in our culture.
If advanced democracy, or "progress" as progressives like to call it, has produced the disintegration of our nation as we see around us, what is the compelling case that can bring us together?
If there has ever been a time for Christians to take a stand, it's now. Wake up. Become engaged in the culture.
A generation after America's founding, Daniel Webster said, "Finally let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought here by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journey by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, to defuse its influence through all their institutions, civil political, or literary."
And he said, "Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction that, that is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity."
Be Vigilant. Be Informed. Be Bold. Be Prayerful.