The Supreme Court’s recent ruling that the constitution protected a high school football coach’s right to pray at midfield after his team’s games left many of us confused. Regardless of where you stand on the issue of prayer in schools, this opinion is difficult to interpret because of the starkly different factual narratives contained in the majority decision and the dissent. Nonetheless, these differences might actually be a feature of the ruling, rather than a bug: By narrowly tailoring the set of facts the ruling hinged on, Justice Gorsuch wrote a majority opinion with a minimal ruling, one that’s a win for pluralism and the free exercise of religion.
According to Gorsuch, Coach Joseph Kennedy was simply offering private prayers during a period after the game in which he was free to attend to personal matters. Kennedy had previously led the team in prayer before and after each game, but then ended these prayer sessions at the school district’s request. Spurred by his own religious convictions, however, Kennedy continued to pray at midfield after games, but he publicly advertised that his prayers were private. For this reason, Gorsuch found that Kennedy was offering these prayers privately, not as a government employee.
Justice Sotomayor’s dissent doesn’t argue that Kennedy had no constitutional right to offer private prayers, but simply denies that Kennedy’s prayers can be classified as private. Providing photographic evidence of Kennedy surrounded by players and media during his prayers, Sotomayor argues that Kennedy ran afoul of the establishment clause. His prayers — which he discussed and publicized on Good Morning America — were anything but private.
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