RIP RBG

[ursus arctos]

Over time, however, a majority of the team came to join him, with the numbers vary- ing from game to game. Kennedy’s practice evolved into postgame talks in which Kennedy would hold aloft student helmets and deliver speeches with “overtly religious references,” which Kennedy described as prayers, while the players kneeled around him.

[Hot Pepsi]

Which, to my mind, is going to be part of the problem. It's a position of leverage for the coach to impose his religion on his team, and none of them will even think twice about it. Absolutely the best way of brainwashing. The same as when everyone in a town goes to church and Sunday school, nobody thinks "it's weird that everyone goes to church and Sunday school".

Yeah, but in the grand scheme of all the brainwashing that goes on in middle-america, the coach praying after a football game is insignificant. It's a fairly mild symptom of a much broader and more complicated problem. People just usually go along with the crowd and don't think very hard. The US is hardly unique in that way.

Even if the public schools are doing everything they should be doing to promote diversity and inclusion, if 90+% of the kids at that school are being taught the same nonsense at home, not much is going to change.

What the right would have you believe is that public schools and universities "brainwash" kids into secularism as a kind of alternative religion. There may be a few examples of that here and there - almost always targeted at Muslims or Jews - but that's not really the case in US schools as far as I know. I went to public schools and a public university where religion was thriving. Kids were free to talk about it and even argue about it. But the diversity of opinion compelled them to maybe take a second look at what they were thinking and doing. That's what the right doesn't want. They can't accept just being one choice in a marketplace of ideas. They want to be the only choice.

I saw that in my religion classes at W&M and at BU, I took some classes that were also for divinity school students - i.e. people who thought they wanted to be clergy. In both cases, I came across students who clearly had never been asked to properly defend their religious positions (or, perhaps, position on anything). The teachers weren't trying to convert them or unconvert them - but to just make them show their work, so to speak. The teachers were usually Christian, after all. But that didn't go over well with a sizeable minority.

[Hot Pepsi]

Yeah. I don't know. The court has gone completely rogue and is just making shit up. I don't know what to do about it.

[San Bernardhinault]

Having read some more on the Coach-praying-on-the-halfway-line ruling, is it possible that school districts and lower courts can just ignore most of the ruling?

Given that Gorsuch's opinion seems to have been ruling on something that wasn't the case - he was talking about quiet prayer by a lone individual - it appears that there is no ruling from the supreme court on someone praying in a way that coerces others into taking part, nor is there a ruling on loud communal religious activity on school property.

So, is it just completely ignorable because it's such obvious gaslighting?

[ursus arctos]

Tell me that you are not a lawyer without . . .

The massively well funded "conservative" legal movement (which encouraged the coach and brought the case in the first place) will make sure that that doesn't happen.

[San Bernardhinault]

I'm sure eventually it would go back to the supreme court each time and Gorsuch would make the same ruling each time. But I'd be deliberately bringing cases like this so that he would have to explicitly admit that he was gaslighting us the first time around. Basically: "You ruled on quiet prayer, what is your opinion on non-quiet prayer?"

But, yes, I'm not a lawyer.

[Hot Pepsi]

Well, the coach doesn't even work there any more, so it's moot for now.

I think that ultimately, it comes down to the students and the parents. Somebody has to object. But in most of these places, that sets them up to be a pariah in their own community.

Of course, increasingly, kids who don't want to deal with that shit just don't join the team.
And that's the problem, the coercion is so quiet. There's never likely to be a smoking gun of a coach saying "Pray or Don't Play."


It's just one more thing that will ultimately turn football into a regional sport and then, God-willing, a minor sport.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpi...h=1222e2a82f37

[ursus arctos]

How are they supposed to bring these cases?

Assuming that they find someone to fund them and sufficient facts, they will lose in most all of the lower courts (given the Kennedy precedent and the bullshit "history and tradition" "test" it sets) and SCOTUS will just refuse to hear any challenges.

[San Bernardhinault]

How are they supposed to bring these cases?

Assuming that they find someone to fund them and sufficient facts, they will lose in most all of the lower courts (given the Kennedy precedent and the bullshit "history and tradition" "test" it sets) and SCOTUS will just refuse to hear any challenges.

Couldn't you bring the case in a less insane lower court? Or, I suppose, force the religious right to bring the case, as they're the ones who're creating a fuss when a school has decided to stop public loud displays of religion.

[ursus arctos]

You would lose in most all less insane federal courts because of the binding precedent.

And if you somehow found a rebel, you are unlikely to have the underlying facts given the ideological geography of the country.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/steve_vladeck/status/1541868069668143108?s=21&t=WwAtmkw9P0KL0ydMxv7qSg

[Hot Pepsi]

Couldn't you bring the case in a less insane lower court? Or, I suppose, force the religious right to bring the case, as they're the ones who're creating a fuss when a school has decided to stop public loud displays of religion.

All of that would be worth a shot just to not let the issue die. The people who want to uphold the First Amendment are not entirely without resources.

Ultimately, the best hope for change is cultural. In this case, it's with the kids and their parents. They have to speak up.

However, there really aren't many communities where this sort of thing is controversial. Which is a problem, even in places where everyone isn't nominally Christian, most of the minority groups have decided it's not worth the hassle to object because they can just ignore it.

And, realistically, I'm not sure how many coaches would actually take away a kids PT because he didn't participate in their prayer. Even at the high school level, coaches have to win to keep their job.

And, as I alluded to before, Richard Dawkins could be their football coach and they'd still be getting coerced and pressured into their parents' religion so many ways outside of school or sports that whether the football coach talks about God or not really doesn't make any practical difference in most cases.

[ursus arctos]

What the Court is making clear is that it is going to do everything in its power to prevent and retard that cultural change, much as it did when it frustrated desegregation and challenges to Jim Crow, the elimination of child labour, the regulation of capital or any of a host of "progressive" goals.

Which is why any change now has to come from the bottom up (especially given the administration's unwillingness to reform the Court).

[Hot Pepsi]

You would lose in most all less insane federal courts because of the binding precedent.

And if you somehow found a rebel, you are unlikely to have the underlying facts given the ideological geography of the country.

Gotta just keep trying, I guess. If nothing else, it might wake up a few more people to what's going on here.
Because a lot of people seem to just be taking the coach and the court at its word that this was all voluntary and above board. The more light that can be shined on it can only help in the long long run.

Easy for me to say. I won't be the one doing it. I don't have kids.

I suppose what I'm feeling now is just the culmination of gradually understanding what Black people, women, LGBTQ and indigenous people have always known. I've known it in my head for a while too, but know I know it in my body.

In 9th grade, I wrote a paper on the censorship of "obscenity." I read The Comics Buyers Guide so was way into anti-censorship. I don't even remember which justices wrote the bullshit about "community standards" and what not. But then I thought "those people went to fancy law schools and what not. Maybe they really know more than me."

I was right the first time. It's just politics and grift all the way down. Wearing a black robe and having good LSATs doesn't change that. Even the justices we like only got there, really, because they supported the positions that the politicians in power wanted them to support.

RBG is a hero, but she could have done a lot to stop this by just fucking retiring when Obama was in office.

I don't know if power makes people corrupt or if power just attracts corrupt people. Probably both. But giving anyone this much power is fucking insane. We'd be better off with a King.

This shit is never going to end. I am pro-extinction.

[Hot Pepsi]

What the Court is making clear is that it is going to do everything in its power to prevent and retard that cultural change, much as it did when it frustrated desegregation and challenges to Jim Crow, the elimination of child labour, the regulation of capital or any of a host of "progressive" goals.

Which is why any change now has to come from the bottom up (especially given the administration's unwillingness to reform the Court).

Yes. Even in the glory years of the Warren Court, they were behind the times.

And, as has been pointed out, schools are actually more segregated now than they were then.

There's just going to be so much more violence and misery than their needs to be.

[San Bernardhinault]

You would lose in most all less insane federal courts because of the binding precedent.

And if you somehow found a rebel, you are unlikely to have the underlying facts given the ideological geography of the country.

But surely the "precedent" created here is for what Gorsuch described happened rather than for what actually happened. Why is a junior court bound by a precedent that hasn't been ruled on?

[ursus arctos]

Plessy was binding precedent for more than half a century based on the "fact" that the railway provision for Blacks and Whites in the South were "separate but equal"

[ursus arctos]

US Courts are a very inefficient venue for challenging the factual basis for Supreme Court precedent.

[Satchmo Distel]

The coach issue is reminiscent of the culture that enabled Sandusky - and the students then protesting Paterno's firing rather than the institutional cover-up of sexual abuse.

[Hot Pepsi]

The coach issue is reminiscent of the culture that enabled Sandusky.

Not exactly, except in the broadest sense that kids, especially, trust coaches and athletes much more than they should. And the same applies to doctors, priests, athletic trainers, movie producers, professors, etc. Anyone who has esteem in that particular community.

But I'd rather not get into that because I have some personal connections to it and it's upsetting.


As I've mentioned before, a guy I know and respect, a pastor who is devoted to racial reconciliation and changing how men are socialized in our society, played D1 football and in the USFL. He never talked about it as a bad experience, but then he told a story about how his coaches at Duke made them do some kind of absurd violent drill after a game (which they'd lost unexpectedly) and he told us, straight up, that in his experience, most football coaches are stuck in adolescence. You'd have to know this guy to understand why him saying that was so profound. He's the kind of guy that rarely has anything harsh to say about anybody. But it's very clear that that that experience shaped his entire world view and career.

He also gave me the line "boys are raising boys." That's not original, but we generally hear that with respect to gang culture, but not applied to people who are paid millions a dollars a year to coach.

This is the point of the article when somebody like Charlie Pierce would go off on a rant about how the players aren't paid and how sports are bad for education and then shoehorn in the concussion thing.

But I don't think it's nearly that complicated.

It's just incentives.

Coaches are paid based on their ability to get wins. In some cases, depending on the institution, they might also care about the kids ability to graduate and get a job. Because graduation rates and successful alumni are good PR.

But they aren't usually qualified to do anything else. Most of these guys have been fixated on football for their entire lives. They usually have a degree, but it's in something like kinesiology or business. Most of them have never had a job outside of sports. The ones that coach in high school might also be teachers, but everyone knows their career is primarily in coaching.

So we shouldn't be shocked that they don't really know what's going on in the world or really understand the lives of their players beyond their athletic ability and, maybe, school transcript.

I think it was Richard Rohr who pointed out that he was just amazed at the simplicity and childishness of the religion of most famous sportsmen. I mean, he's not the only one, but it was another one of those cases of a mild-mannered guy who generally tries never to call out anyone in particular very definitely calling out somebody in particular (or a group), so it was memorable.

We need to drop the expectation that big time sports will turn "boys into men." The best we can usually hope for is that it does not impede that process.

[ad hoc]

I learned via a Facebook thread yesterday that the 6 year old son of a friend of mine was literally made to sit in a cupboard every day because he refused to say the words "under god" during the pledge of allegiance. This went on for 6 months. This is the kind of culture that is at play here. Fucking hell. (my friend had no idea obviously or she'd have raised hell, but her son dealt with it himself - pretty fucking ballsy for a 6 year old I think)

(the son is now 27 and seemingly very well adjusted, so he didn't suffer any lasting trauma you'll be glad to hear)

[Hot Pepsi]

I’m pretty sure that’s still illegal, but we shall see.

[ursus arctos]

Well, the corporal punishment itself isn't illegal in about 20 states (and private schools everywhere), but the reason for it is a clear violation of the kid's constitutional rights that it would be hard for the school to defend as proportional.

[Hot Pepsi]

That’s what I thought.

[Satchmo Distel]

Double standards on kids' rights - I can't teach you about LGBT but can hit you across the arse.