Coach Joseph Kennedy’s “private, personal prayer” (photo: Sotomayor dissent).

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion on Kennedy v. Bremerton that “the Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike.” The case was about whether there was a problem with a Washington state assistant football coach leading prayers—Christian prayers, lest you be confused—in the locker room before games and on the field. The Supreme Court that we have today, for reasons, determined that Kennedy was protected in his right to express his personal religious beliefs—by dropping a knee, on the 50-yard line of a public school playing field, and calling on players to join him—and that they presented no harm to anyone, or to the nominal separation of church and state.

It’s another Supreme Court ruling that bases itself in a reality that doesn’t exist. This ruling in particular irritates meaningfully, because of course we know that “taking a knee” is the sort of gesture that is either a fresh wind of free expression, or a horrible affront to the values we hold dear, depending on who does it.

So we’ll hear today from Dave Zirin, sports editor at The Nation and author of many books, including, most recently, The Kaepernick Effect: Taking a Knee, Changing the World.

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Paul Robeson

And we’ll get a little corrective background for corporate media’s current conversation, about the voices of athletes or performers who are mainly told to “shut up and sing,” and their actual historical role in social change, from journalist and author Howard Bryant.  CounterSpin talked with him in June 2018, and we hear part of that conversation this week.

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Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of Supreme Court nominees.

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