Editor’s note: Joseph Kennedy’s publicist and attorney have objected to parts of this article. Their objections are outlined in a follow-up story.
Remember the former high school assistant football coach who was so desirous of praying on the 50-yard line after games that he took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court?
The high court ordered a Washington state school district to give that coach, Joseph Kennedy, his old job back. To which the coach-turned-conservative celebrity declared: “As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight.”
Problem is, Coach Kennedy is a no-show, according to a columnist for the Seattle Times who has been following the story.
The red arrow shows Joseph Kennedy in the middle of a prayer huddle after a Bremerton High School football game, as his case was gaining media attention.
After all that attention, all the publicity, all the demands for being reinstated, it appears that’s not what the coach really wanted after all, according to research by Danny Westneat of the Times. Further, the coach’s former employment situation was so egregiously misrepresented by his evangelical attorneys — a lie repeated within the court majority’s opinion — that it makes the demand for rehiring all the more peculiar.
The court’s opinion in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District caused conservative evangelicals to rejoice and traditional church-state separationists to howl. The court’s new conservative supermajority abandoned decades of precedent and favored evangelicals’ desire to freely exercise their religious beliefs over the constitutional prohibition on establishment of religion.
Lost in the publicity over that ruling — which said Coach Kennedy had a right to hold a prayer meeting at the 50-yard line after high school football games — was the ruling that Kennedy should get his old job back. That demand was made on the premise that Kennedy had been fired from the job because of his prayer practice, which turns out not to be true.
Westneat wrote: “The school district has been flummoxed about what’s happened since (the court ruling). They complied by offering to reinstate him, they say, and now the football season is in full swing. But Kennedy is nowhere near the sidelines. ‘He’s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8, and we haven’t gotten so much as a phone call,’ says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools.”
Where was the coach? According to Westneat, he was in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. And on the eve of the Bremerton school’s first game of this season, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.
“The weekend of the second game, which the Knights also won, Kennedy appeared with former President Donald Trump at the Trump National Golf Club in New Jersey,” the Times reported. “He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.”
The celebrity coach is on the speaking circuit.
In short, the celebrity coach is on the speaking circuit. He doesn’t have time to be an assistant football coach at a high school.
What’s worse, Kennedy’s schtick on the speaking circuit is about “the prayer that got me fired.” But he wasn’t actually fired.
That’s a fact attorneys for the school district tried to reinforce at the Supreme Court, but their facts fell on deaf ears. A majority of justices in the highest court in the land fell for a lie told by Kennedy’s legal team.
The Times explained: “In 2015, he was put on paid leave near the end of the season after holding a series of prayer sessions on the field with students and state legislators. He still got paid for his full assistant coach contract, about $5,000. High school assistants often work on yearly deals, and Kennedy, at odds with the head coach and aggrieved by what had happened, never reapplied to work the 2016 season.”
The district is emphatic: He was not fired.
But Kennedy attorney Paul Clement told the court: “The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer.” The Times noted that the words “fired,” “fire” or “firing” were used 16 times in the hour and a half session before the Supreme Court.
“You can’t sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn’t apply,” school district attorney Michael Tierney told lower court. “The district didn’t get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn’t fail to rehire him.”
As the Times reported: “The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact — along with a host of others. At one point during oral arguments, as a different school district attorney was saying the narrative that had been spun didn’t fit with the facts — that the coach’s prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired — Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying ‘I know that you want to make this very complicated.’”
For now, the undisputable fact is that the praying coach hasn’t shown up for the job he said he wanted back. But the game goes on.
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