{"id":32194,"date":"2022-09-17T12:43:38","date_gmt":"2022-09-17T16:43:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=32194"},"modified":"2022-09-17T12:43:38","modified_gmt":"2022-09-17T16:43:38","slug":"the-praying-coach-story-gets-even-more-surreal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=32194","title":{"rendered":"The praying coach story gets even more surreal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs soon as the<\/a> school district says \u2018Hey, come back,\u2019 I am there, first flight,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

So the school district has been flummoxed about what\u2019s happened since. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s had the paperwork for his reinstatement since August 8th, and we haven\u2019t gotten so much as a phone call,\u201d says Karen Bevers, spokesperson for Bremerton schools.<\/p>\n

Instead, as the Bremerton Knights were prepping for the season in August, Kennedy was up in Alaska, meeting with former Vice President Mike Pence and evangelist Franklin Graham. On the eve of the first game, which the Knights won, Kennedy was in Milwaukee being presented with an engraved .22-caliber rifle at an American Legion convention.<\/p>\n

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. He saw Trump get a religious award from a group called the American Cornerstone Institute.<\/p>\n

Coming up this month, Kennedy\u2019s scheduled to give a talk as part of a lectureship series at a Christian university in Arkansas.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlace a PR\/Publicity Request,\u201d invites his personal website, where he\u2019s known as Coach Joe.<\/p>\n

...<\/p>\n

\u201cThe record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,\u201d lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words \u201cfired,\u201d \u201cfire\u201d or \u201cfiring\u201d were used 16 times in the hour and a half session.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t true though. The district\u2019s lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail.<\/p>\n

...<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t sue them for failing to rehire you if you didn\u2019t apply,\u201d one lawyer, Mercer Island\u2019s Michael Tierney, argued during a lower court session. \u201cThe District didn\u2019t get an application from him, had four positions to fill and filled them with people who had applied. It didn\u2019t fail to rehire him.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court simply ignored this inconvenient fact \u2014 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\u2019t fit with the facts \u2014 that the coach\u2019s prayers were neither silent nor solitary, nor was he fired \u2014 Justice Samuel Alito interrupted him, saying \u201cI know that you want to make this very complicated.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cAs soon as the school district says \u2018Hey, come back,\u2019 I am there, first flight,\u201d he said. So the school district has been flummoxed about what\u2019s happened since. 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. \u201cHe\u2019s had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32195,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32194\/revisions\/32195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}