After a years-long legal battle, Kennedy is waiting for the school to offer him his old job back.
The Supreme Court ruled Monday that former high-school football coach Joseph Kennedy had the right to pray on the field after games. After a years-long legal battle which he says culminated in a “great win for the country,” Kennedy just wants to go back to coaching.
“I couldn’t stop smiling. As it kind of settled in, it was just a big sigh of relief, like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders and the past seven years have been well worth it, knowing that I didn’t do anything wrong. Being vindicated is great, it’s a great feeling,” Kennedy told National Review.
The court ruled 6-3 in favor of Kennedy, who claimed he was unjustly fired in 2015 from Bremerton School District in Washington for praying on the field after football games.
The purpose of praying after playing football was to “give thanks” and to “give God the glory after every game, win or lose, right there on the battlefield,” Kennedy said. He has claimed he gave players the option to pray with him after games, but it was not required.
Kennedy brought the case up to the Supreme Court after the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled in favor of the school district.
He said the majority of his community was supportive of him throughout the years-long battle, and the first few years were the hardest as he could no longer coach his former players.
“You’re going to have that small percentage that want to yell and scream… and most of those people just didn’t understand what the facts of the case were,” Kennedy continued, saying he has “grace” for those that were “ignorant” about the case.
Over the years, the case gained prominence on both sides of the aisle. Many of Kennedy’s detractors cast his legal challenge as a threat to the separation of church and state, while his supporters pointed out that his decision to pray on the field doesn’t violate the Constitution’s Establishment Clause.
In the dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority’s decision erodes “the protections for religious liberty for all.”
“It elevates one individual’s interest in personal religious exercise, in the exact time and place of that individual’s choosing, over society’s interest in protecting the separation between church and state, eroding the protections for religious liberty for all,” Sotomayor wrote. She was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan in the dissent.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the opinion, “Kennedy’s private religious exercise did not come close to crossing any line one might imagine separating protected private expression from impermissible government coercion.”
In response to Sotomayor’s claim of separation of church and state, Kennedy’s attorney, Jeremey Dys, said those words “don’t appear in the Constitution.”
“The court has been recently reminding Americans that the text of the Constitution is what matters,” Dys continued, saying the state “violated” Kennedy’s civil rights and “fired him for exercising his rights” of free speech and religion.
“The First Amendment is alive and well,” Kennedy added.
Now, he’s waiting for the school district to call him and give him his job back.
“All I ever asked for is just to be a coach, and to be able to exercise my freedoms,” Kennedy concluded.