Court: E. Brunswick football coach can't kneel, bow head as team prays

star ledger ^ | 04.15.08 | Chandra M. Hayslett/

[Coleus]

The East Brunswick school board was within its rights to tell a football coach he cannot kneel and bow his head as members of his team have a student-led pre-game prayer, a federal appeals court ruled today.  The ruling from the U.S. 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia reversed a lower-court ruling made almost two years ago.  All three members of the three-judge panel wrote their own opinions on the issue, which pits the right to free speech against the freedom from official establishment of a religion.

The judges agreed the East Brunswick Board of Education's policy barring school staff from joining in student-led was constitutional. But the judges differed on what exactly a coach should do when his team prays.  From the time Marcus Borden became the Bears' coach in 1983, he was deeply involved in team prayers; for a time, he even led them. In 2005, school officials received complaints that he was leading prayers and asked him to stop participating.  He sued the school board seeking to be allowed to bow his head and kneel when students led their own prayers. A lower-court judge found that should be allowed.

The East Brunswick Board of Education appealed Cavanaugh's ruling, saying that by taking a knee and bowing his head, Borden was endorsing religion whether he mouthed the words with his players or not.   The appeal was taken over by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a Washington, D.C., group that opposes prayer in schools.   "We find that based on the history of Borden's conduct with the team's players, his acts cross the line and constitute an unconstitutional endorsement of religion," the judges wrote in the ruling.

[wintertime]

Courts never address the underlying problem.

Government schools, the First Amendment and freedom of conscience can NOT coexist. This is issue that is **always** ignored in these court rulings.

There are 2 competing actions here, and the 2 can not be exercised simultaneously, and it puts the school in a Catch 22.

1) The coach will not pray.
This action impinges upon the coach's First Amendment Right to free speech and exercise of his religion. It also teaches the children that this coach ( a government representative) rejects God. Rejecting God in one's life is NOT a religiously neutral lesson. Rejection of God will have non-neutral political, cultural, and religious consequences for the student.

2) The school will allow the coach to pray.
This action imposes upon the non-religous students a school sanctioned religious activity. Surely if a citizen has a right to exercise his religion, he also has a right not to have religion imposed upon him by the government.

Solution: Begin the process or privatizing universal K-12 education. Let these matters be privately decided among parents, principals, teachers, and coaches.

Also.....As these First Amendment conflicts arise in other government institutions, it is best to get government out of as much as possible.

[snowman1]

I’ll bet if he got on his knees and faces toward the East and banged his head on the floor and shouted Allah
Akbar not a word would have been said out of shear panic.

[Intolerant in NJ]

It isn’t Congress making a law forbidding the coach from praying, so the school can get away with this crap...but leftists have used the first amendment to stop even those who want to have public prayer or display of the ten commandments by blurring the specific mention of Congress into, as the story mentions, "official" or other approximations and claiming that the intended activity is therefore unconstitutional because some governmental agent like a school or courthouse is involved - what's really unconstitutional is this substitution or, if they insist on seeing the school as being the same as the Congress, the ignoring of the freedom of exercise phrase which should prohibit the school from getting away with it........