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

star ledger ^ | 04.15.08 | Chandra M. Hayslett/

[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........