Praying Football Coach Gets Job Back, Immediately Quits, Will Probably Whine About It At Next CPAC

What did the Lord say about charlatans?

Imagine a child. Let’s say she’s about three. She desperately, desperately wants an apple. You say no. You say it’s too close to dinnertime, honey. She throws an absolute shitfit. There are tears. There are screams of “BUT I WAAAAAAANT IT!” By this point, you’re wondering what on Earth possessed you to birth this squalling, demented snot demon in the first place. Finally you give in. Fuck it, so dinner will be an apple at five in the afternoon. You go ahead and cut up the apple and present it to her on some little goddamn plastic plate with the princess from Frozen emblazoned on it. Your daughter has calmed down. The tears have dried. She looks at this Frozen plate with the slices of apple cut up and neatly arranged. She looks at you, and in a quavering voice that makes you think of plumes of ash escaping a volcano, demands you put the apple back together before she’ll eat it.

Now imagine your daughter is Joe Kennedy of Bremerton, Washington, and the apple is not an apple but rather his job as a football coach at a local high school. You see where we’re going with this, right?

Kennedy was the football coach who used to pray to Jesus on the 50-yard line after every Bremerton High football game, usually with dozens of players kneeling around him, some of them holding their helmets up in the air in case the Lord needed a little help making out the logo. The school district, being familiar with the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, ordered him to knock it off. Kennedy sued all the way to the Supreme Court, which last year ruled in his favor. The Court even flat-out lied about the circumstances under which Kennedy held his prayer circles, despite photographic evidence from the case file contradicting it, because it’s the Supreme Court and what are you going to do about it, huh?

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Then came this, from the Seattle Times:

After winning a U.S. Supreme Court case to get his coaching job back and igniting a firestorm over praying in public schools, Joe Kennedy resigned only one game into Bremerton High School’s football season.

Kennedy, already back in Pensacola, Fla., where he and his wife have lived for three years, said he emailed his resignation at 4 a.m. Wednesday due to a family health situation and what he described as a deteriorating situation at the Bremerton School District.

There was video all over the Internet of Kennedy, after last Friday’s game, doing his usual prayer shtick in the middle of the field and violating Jesus’s command in Matthew 6: 5-6 to pray to the Lord but not be such a fucking public drama queen about it.

Nonetheless, Kennedy in his resignation letter claimed that the school district was not fully complying with the Court’s order that he be reinstated, that the district took action to “diminish [his] role and single [him] out” in retaliation. He also told the Times that his “roles and responsibilities” at Friday’s game were not what he signed up for.

Pardon our cynical hearts, but we think Kennedy is so full of shit that his shoes squeak when he walks. He didn’t want his job back. Maybe he did in 2015, but somewhere along the way he discovered he could make a better living and get nonstop ego-stroking from his fellow Christians on the Wingnut Martyr Circuit.

As noted above, Kennedy and his wife moved across the country to Florida three years ago. They had long since sold their house in Bremerton. In fact, part of the argument the Bremerton School District made to SCOTUS was that the whole case was now moot for this reason.

Nonsense, Kennedy’s lawyers told Sean Hannity when the meathead of a cable host last year worried the school district would not follow the Supreme Court’s ruling:

[O]ne of Kennedy’s lawyers clarified that they had no choice: “We’re ready to have that fight. If they want to defy the Supreme Court, I think they’re gonna realize they made a serious mistake.”

Kennedy was sunnier about it all.

“As soon as the school district says ‘Hey, come back,’ I am there, first flight,” he said.

So in August of 2022 after the ruling, the school district sent Kennedy his reinstatement paperwork. He never responded, because he was too busy flying off to Alaska to be feted by Mike Pence and Franklin Graham and hanging out with Donald Trump at his golf club in New Jersey.

Who would want to go back to two-a-days in the August heat, yelling at sullen teenagers who were in elementary school when this whole saga got started, for a measly $5,000 for the season? Where’s the glory in that?

So why did Kennedy come back for the one game this season? He admitted he and his wife had no plans to move back to Bremerton. He flew in for a few days, crashed at a friend’s house, coached in one game, did his little prayer shtick (at which, it should be noted, not a single player or fan ran on the field to join him), then resigned by email at four in the morning and flew back to Florida.

We can’t help noticing that Kennedy has a book coming out in October about his ordeal. He’s giving paid speeches around the country. What are the chances he purposely tanked the coaching job he allegedly yearned to get back in order to boost his book sales and his speaking fees, and giving himself a nice little new story of his martyrdom that he can spread to the faithful about how the godless heathens of Bremerton High School are still persecuting him for his faith?

We’ll say 100 percent, and take the over.

[Seattle Times / Slate]