Best of: A decision that continues to create misguided claims: Kennedy v. Bremerton

A 2022 decision from the Supreme Court continues to sow confusion and misguided claims four years later. Today, we're revisiting our conversation on the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision, where the Court ruled for a public school official and abandoned long-standing Establishment Clause protections in ways that harm the religious freedom rights of students. Hear Amanda and Holly react right after this decision and ponder just what, exactly, would actually constitute "coercion" for this Court. The Supreme Court did not overrule the previous school prayer cases with the decision, but it did gut some of the consensus that protects the religious liberty rights of everyone at public schools.

This conversation was recorded in front of a live audience on June 29, 2022, and was first released July 7, 2022.

SHOW NOTES

Segment 1 (starting at 02:57): Not solving a problem, but creating one: Kennedy v. Bremerton decision

You can read the Bremerton opinion here, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion includes photos of the prayer practice at issue (see pages 9 and 10 of the dissent, which are on pages 49 and 50 of the opinion PDF document).

We released three podcasts on this case:

• We previewed the case in April 2022 in Episode 14 of Season 3 in an episode titled "#NoPrayToPlay."

• We recapped the oral arguments in Episode 15 of that same season: "The coach is the loudspeaker and the field is his classroom: Recapping the arguments in Kennedy v. Bremerton"

• We released this episode as our season 3 finale. The full episode is titled "Not solving a problem, but creating one: Dissecting the Kennedy v. Bremerton decision"

Segment 2 (starting at 26:51): Concluding thoughts

For all of BJC's resources on this case, visit BJConline.org/Bremerton.

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