Justice has been served after a long seven-year battle by Coach Kennedy to pray on the football field after games.
For years, Coach Kennedy would pray silently on the 50-yard lines following the high school football games that he coached here in Washington at Bremerton High School.
After nearly half the team began to pray, voluntarily, alongside him, the school told him he could no longer pray publicly.
Now the high school has been told, after a Supreme Court victory this summer, that it must back down from its silencing of faithful individuals.
Bremerton High School must reinstate Coach Joseph Kennedy after firing him for praying with his team, The Blaze reported. Coach Kennedy won at the Supreme Court in June – the Family Policy Institute of Washington was proud to file an amicus brief in his support!
As Justice Gorsuch observed in his majority opinion, school staff “were free to speak with a friend, call for a reservation at a restaurant, check email, or attend to other personal matters.” But Coach Kennedy could not spend a few minutes thanking God? The Founding Fathers never envisioned a day where individuals were punished for offering a thanksgiving to God.
The battle against secular atheism is a long fight that will likely not end until the end of times, but Coach Kennedy notched a victory for believers in his arduous battle. Along the way he showed fortitude in not letting the school and groups like the ACLU push him around by getting him to stop. When leftists tried to get him to abandon his faith publicly, he kept going, even when it meant losing his job rather than forfeiting his values.
He also practiced patience throughout – seven years of fighting to regain his job and ensure protection of religious liberty takes patience and an unshakeable faith in God.
Coach Kennedy should be a model to all of us who face daily attacks on our religious faith. We know that secular leftists want to drive our Christianity from the classrooms – and replace it with LGBT ideology and woke racial politics. But we must stand firm against the forces of evil.
Our faith is meant to be shared. In fact, we have a duty to do so.
We must not allow the government to confine prayer to the places that it deems appropriate. Christ calls us to “pray without ceasing,” and regardless of where we may be, we must respond to this call (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
Let us all pray in thanksgiving for Coach Kennedy’s return to his job and for ourselves to have the same fortitude and patience that he showed throughout this battle.
