https://gocomics.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c5f3053ef0162fdcbdaba970d-pi
From 2010.
Johnson was reluctant to accept responsibility for the gaffe, posting on his Twitter account post-game that it was in fact God’s fault.
“I PRAISE YOU 24/7!!! AND THIS HOW YOU DO ME!!! YOU EXPECT ME TO LEARN FROM THIS??? HOW!!! ILL NEVER FORGET THIS!! EVER!!! THX THO…,” Johnson tweeted.
To be fair, football in dangerous enough that if you’re the praying type, thankfulness that no one got hurt is probably appropriate.
Of course, a better solution is to just not let kids play a game with so much potential to scramble their brains.
There are high school teams with Devil mascots. I would love to see them use “Hail Satan” and the like in their cheers.
Just sayin.
A personal prayer is fine, if a group wishes to organise themselves and pray together then equally fine.
The problem for me with anything like this is where the activities or beliefs of someone or some group in charge creates an power imbalance or an obligation (or appearance of an obligation) to follow suit.
And that is true whether we are talking about religion or politics. Compelled or coerced speech/actions on such matters seems to me a wholly bad thing.
Pressure to kneel for, or sing an anthem, to kneel or otherwise salute and support political campaigns, pressure to pray. All wrong.
They are all personal positions for which one might have very personal reasons for supporting or not and personal preferences for how and when you choose to display such support or not.
You can’t compel me to hail satan. That jerk still owes me $3.50
THE POWER OF THE DARK LORD COMPELS YOU!!!
let me know if that works.
It’s not at all clear to me that this Court wouldn’t overrule the school prayer cases anyway.
What if it were a Hail Satan pass? Would it be more or less likely to complete than a Hail Mary one?
I think that the court is going to find in the Coaches favor either unanimously or near-unanimously. If it is after the game is over, such that a player who didn’t want to participate could wander off drink some Gatorade, find his parents in the crowd, and then hit the showers, then its hard to distinguish between it and a voluntary prayer get together of like minded people congregating on their own time. The issue as others have said is coercion. And while there is some implicit coercion they would really need to demonstrate explicit coercion in order to make their case against the coaches practice.
They would need to have a player who refused to participate come forward and report the negative consequences that they endured by doing so. Of course that requires a student who a brave enough to take a stand and suffer the consequences, and Rosa Parkses aren’t that common. There is of course implicit coercion in the whole system but that is almost impossible to eliminate without dismantling religion entirely. A coach could just as easily stop giving game time to a student who wasn’t at church last Sunday.
As far as a coach bowing to Mecca after the game, what would happen is that either he would be ignored or the crowds would boo him, but it wouldn’t evolve into a de facto prayer meeting because few ore more likely none of the team members would follow his lead. If the school board stepped in fired him for praying then he could do as the coach in this case did and defend his practice in court on first amendment grounds. That is why Religious conservatives aren’t worried about cases like this one biting them in the ass. Public shaming for not following the crowd only works in one direction.
I don’t think that there is any question as to the coach prevailing in this case. The question will be whether the conservatives on the court try to expand the scope of the decision far beyond the facts of the case, and argue like UltraVires does that deciding for the coach in this case effectively legalizes school prayer.
The issue is a little different than prior cases (that I’m aware of) He violated his employer’s policy. It seems to me an employer, even a public school, should be able to make this kind of rule for its staff.
But the rule was created specifically because of what he was doing, and could be argued to violate his first amendment rights.
There are still a few judges left on the Supreme Court, you know.
And it’s completely irrelevant that it’s after the game is over, because it’s not after the school-sponsored event is over. Players are not, in fact, free to go the moment the game clock ticks over to 0.
We’ll see. I bet you 50 quatraloons that at least one of the 3 liberal justices sides with the coach.
It was “after games had ended and after both teams’ players and coaches met at midfield to shake hands.” I don’t know whether that means the coach was “on his own time” at that point, but that might be one of the issues the case depends on.
Tree fiddy? Are you sure it’s not the Loch Ness Monster?
But he’s still an employee currently at his place of employment. He hasn’t left the property. Would any private employee be able to argue that the rules no longer apply once you clock out?
There’s also the appearance issue. A teacher on school property inherently looks like they are acting on behalf of the school, just like any public facing employee acting on their employer’s property. It inherently looks like it’s something sponsored by the school.
There’s a reason why, even when we did that whole “praying around the flag pole” thing, it had to be student led. We were on school property, so a teacher leading it would make it seem official, and then it would be the school promoting a particular religious practice.
This is a teacher giving a sermon on school property. To students of that self-same school.
How is this different from the school prayer cases? The counter argument there was much like yours here. That students in the classroom are free not to pray (as long as they remain silent and orderly), they are not required to believe in the words the teacher is praying, nor are they required to believe in God in any form.
But the Court ruled then that they were not required to show explicit coercion (for example, the teacher giving better marks to the praying students, or lesser marks to the non-praying students). It held that it was enough that there would be the implicit coercion that they would be ostracized by their peers for not participating in the prayer.
I don’t see the difference here. In your opinion, how does an opinion for the coach not automatically call into question the school prayer cases instead of being an “expanding the scope” of a decision for the coach? How would such an opinion read to make a distinction because, IMHO, what you have written here does not make that distinction.
In addition, a concern in the school prayer cases was that the non-praying students would feel like outcasts, like the community/school/society/government believed in that particular religious message and the fact that they did not subscribe to that message left them out in the cold, so to speak.
That seems additionally on all fours with this case. Wouldn’t the players on the team who did not want to pray feel exactly the same?