God and football. Angry school officials and Satanists. That’s a combo that gets a lot of readers.
In the fall of 2015, soon after I moved to Seattle, a conflict arose across Puget Sound about a football coach who prayed on the 50-yard line after games and a school district that forbade him to do so. Here’s what I wrote back then about the coverage.
On Monday, Coach Joe Kennedy’s case went before the U.S. Supreme Court, the first time in decades that a school-prayer case has been heard by the justices. This time I was covering it for Newsweek, starting at 7 a.m. my time, which is when the debate went live on the East Coast.
Usually, the justices race through their hearings in only one hour. Kennedy v. Bremerton School District took nearly two. (You can listen to these debates on a live audio feed.)
You heard justices ask about Young Life clubs. They pondered the significance of whether a teacher who goes to an Ash Wednesday service and arrives at school with a smudge on her forehead is doing anything illegal. Would a coach have been disciplined by the school district if he planted a Ukrainian flag on the 50-yard line instead of praying?
In short, it was fascinating, and I thought most of the stories on the hearing were quite good with a few bad apples. Many of the headlines said the majority-conservative court “appeared sympathetic” to the coach, which I disagree with. The justices appeared more confused by the conflicting narratives. As Justice Stephen Breyer plaintively noted at one point: "One of my problems in this case, is that the parties seem to have different views of the facts."
The Supreme Court had turned down the case a few years ago because the facts weren’t clear and apparently, they still weren’t as of Monday. For instance, the defense said that students felt coerced into joining the coach in his prayers, and they included an amicus brief from one unnamed former player who said he felt coerced. Yet, when the Seattle Times pigeonholed three local football players about the issue back in 2015, none of them said they felt forced to go along.
It’s tough to cover Supreme Court stories in general and this was maybe my fourth time in doing so — ever. I want to give a shout-out to Kelsey Dallas’ piece in The Deseret News as one of the most succinct that I read on explaining the issues behind Monday’s arguments.
Past rulings on prayer in schools have generally focused on the concept of coercion, with judges aiming to discern whether students are being pressured to participate in a religious activity. Due to coercion concerns, the Supreme Court in recent decades has ruled against prayers offered from the stage at graduation ceremonies and prayers offered over the loud speaker at school football games.
However, the conversation during Monday’s hearing showed that defining coercion is trickier than it seems. The justices and attorneys for both sides agreed that a football coach cannot compel his players to pray with him or show any sort of favoritism to students who share his faith. But they differed on whether praying alone in young people’s presence and allowing them to join if they want to raises the same concerns.
I thought Nina Totenberg’s walk-up to the arguments (a walk-up is an article previewing the day’s hearing) for NPR was quite good as well, but I want to pull out three paragraphs that show how the waters got muddied in this case.
The story picks up when the coach decides to publicly defy the school district’s Sept. 17, 2015, order not to publicly pray after the game. On Oct. 16 during the homecoming game:
But as events unfolded, "it was a zoo," said John Polm, Bremerton High's principal, describing the homecoming game during his deposition. Attendance doubled, five TV stations showed up, and a group of Satanists unsuccessfully attempted to take the field to perform their own competing ritual.
Nathan Gillam, who served as head coach, broke down in his deposition when describing the harassment he experienced before and at the game and the chaos that ensued after. "I was done coaching at that point because I feared for my life," he said. Despite his 11 years building the program, he decided "this is not worth it; I have two children."
After the final whistle blew, a largely pro-prayer crowd mobbed the field, overcoming the extra security presence and knocking over some band members and cheerleaders. Surrounded by TV cameras and some players, Kennedy knelt to pray on the field while a state representative placed his hand on Kennedy's shoulder in support.
A lot of what I heard from the district’s side was how awful things were once the coach decided to pray against the district’s orders and many journalists repeated this train of thought.
However, they missed a major point. The case wasn’t about whether Kennedy courted the media and various politicians who showed up at his last games. It concerned what had been going on before that; since 2008, when Kennedy was hired as a part-time coach.
According to Kennedy’s side and most media accounts, no one had any problem with Kennedy’s mid-field post-game prayers during those years; in fact, the school principal, the aforementioned John Polm, didn’t even know such prayers were going on. I traveled to Bremerton (which is about a 75-mile drive from where I live) to research the case and that was the first question I raised: What planet had Polm been on all this time?
I’ve also subbed for three Seattle-area school districts in the past five years and one thing I’ve learned is that if today’s breed of student is upset about anything, he or she will complain about it. So, the utter lack of complaints about this coach over seven football seasons; the ongoing good recommendations from Gillam, Kennedy’s supervisor over these years (and Gillam certainly knew of these prayer huddles) told me the prayers — and the inspirational speeches from Kennedy that sometimes accompanied them — weren’t an issue for several years.
But the district doesn’t want to talk about how it was caught sleeping at the wheel. No one was complaining to them about Kennedy’s prayers. They learned of his religious activities by accident and, fearful of being sued, told the coach to knock it off.
A Slate story on the arguments, which was poisonous to the point of being ridiculous, made out the coach as this nefarious monster forcing his beliefs on unwilling students. However, it raised one interesting point about coaching in general based on one justice serving as a coach in his off hours.
But one surprisingly piercing series of questions from Justice Brett Kavanaugh cut through many layers of deception to reach the heart of the case: the profound yet often subtle pressure on students to participate in school prayer, even when doing so violates their own faith…
Most of the conservative justices ignored this aspect of the case. Kavanaugh, who moonlights as a coach himself, did not.
Kavanaugh, according to the Chicago Tribune, coaches girls basketball at local Catholic schools in Maryland.
Midway through arguments, he forced Kennedy’s lawyer, Paul Clement, to address it directly, asking: “What about the player who thinks, if I don’t participate in this, I won’t start next week? Or the player who thinks, if I do participate in this, I will start next week?”
Clement responded that the school could issue “a clear message that that’s inappropriate,” but Kavanaugh pushed back. “How will you ferret that out?” the justice asked. “Because every player’s trying to get on the good side of the coach. And every parent is worried about the coach exercising favoritism in terms of the starting lineup, playing time, recommendations for colleges, etc.”
The best Clement could offer was a bromide: “If any coach or teacher does it, shame on them and they should be punished.”
Some of the better stories out there put Kennedy into the context of his surroundings. Despite Bremerton’s small-town atmosphere and conservative bent due to the presence of a naval base in its midst, it’s one of the least-churched parts of the ultra-blue Washington state. Kennedy was not praying up a storm at a school in the Deep South.
Active warships homeport in Bremerton, including the U.S.S. Nimitz aircraft carrier. Up Hood Canal from Bremerton is Naval Base Kitsap at Bangor, home to eight nuclear submarines, seven of which are armed with nuclear weapons, making the area the world’s third-largest atomic arsenal. So if Russia ever decides to nuke the West Coast, the missiles would hit Bremerton and the Kitsap peninsula first.
If you go to Bremerton, you can’t miss the military statues, parks and nomenclature everywhere. An ESPN story did a good job of explaining the grittiness of the area and included sports-specific details, naturally from a reporter who traveled to Bremerton.
Kennedy sued, and over the past seven years his case has wound its way from this blue-collar, military town across the Puget Sound from Seattle to the U.S. Supreme Court. The case thrust Kennedy, a former Marine who only reluctantly signed on to help coach a mediocre high school football team, into what legal analysts see as potentially one of the most consequential cases in recent years testing the separation of church and state.
The question before the Supreme Court is whether Kennedy's on-field prayers are protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty, or whether they violate the First Amendment by promoting his religion. …
Many legal observers say it is likely that the Supreme Court will rule in Kennedy's favor, given its recent deference to religious liberty. But the case's larger impact will turn on whether the justices view Kennedy's prayers as private expressions of thanks or public spectacles. Their decision could loosen legal restrictions on how teachers and other staff can express their faith in public schools.
As I began researching the story before driving to Bremerton in early March, it was clear I was following a complex history that was more than six years old and involved a transient military community. Kids who knew Kennedy as a coach and could testify whether they felt forced into joining his prayer circle were no longer around.
Local media, such as the South Kitsap Sun, had written quite a bit about Kennedy at the time, so I could draw on their reporting about Kennedy’s rather messy personal life.
Now Kennedy and his lawyers (who accompanied me the day I was there) didn’t bring up some of those details — or Kennedy was a tad vague when I asked him why his present church seemed to be missing from this battle. Later, I called Holy Trinity, a Catholic church that Kennedy and his wife had a slight connection to years before, and they refused to talk.
There were some gaps in this story, and it was obvious that the coach and his legal team from First Liberty Institute — who had video and lots of photos at the ready — were managing the narrative for me and the stream of reporters interviewing Kennedy that week. This sort of thing is not unusual.
Apparently the school district didn’t learn about these back-to-back press visits until the last minute, which is when Americans United for Separation of Church and State swung into action. As the legal firm representing the district, they threw together a coalition of clergy and a local parent who knew Kennedy to present their side of the story.
But the clergy I talked with were either new to town or their small congregations had no members who had been impacted by Kennedy’s actions from 2008-2015. The parent had hearsay about local residents being unhappy about Kennedy, but apparently his own son — who was on Kennedy’s team in 2010 -– suffered no ill effects.
Reporters were being fed narratives from both sides, both of which picked and chose which details to include and which to leave out. I saw some media castigate Kennedy for making himself out to be a saint-like mentor to young football players while failing to criticize the district and its team for creating an overblown account of the terrible harm wrought by this same coach.
They also blasted Kennedy for going to the media and local politicians. Admit it: If you were a retired Marine on a military pension, wouldn’t you scramble for help wherever you could find it? These are the kinds of games both sides play, and journalists can’t get caught up in them.
Hopefully the high court will establish new precedent by explaining how the establishment clause of the First Amendment should play out in school settings. The two lawyers — not related to the case — that I interviewed after the hearing both hoped that the Court would be decisive and clear in however it rules.
I’m glad the justices took Kennedy’s situation seriously. As I’ve been following this case, I’ve been wondering where the big take-out story is. Where is that 8,000-word narrative piece this topic deserves in publications like the The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s and other magazines? Had Kennedy been other than a white male with a military background, would the MSM have devoted time and space to his case?
We all know the answer, don’t we?
IMAGES: Courtesy of First Liberty Institute