The US supreme court is letting prayer back in public schools. This is unsettling | Moira Donegan

The court's rightwing majority was extremely receptive to a case this week that would weaken the separation of church and state

On Monday, the United States supreme court overturned decades of precedent governing the separation of church and state, and achieved one of the most long-standing goals of the Christian right: the return of official Christian prayer to public schools.

Kennedy v Bremerton School District had a strange path to the supreme court. Initially filed in 2015, the case concerns Joseph Kennedy, formerly a public high school football coach from a Seattle suburb, who sued the community that used to employ him for religious discrimination after the school objected to his habit of making public, ostentatious Christian prayers on the 50 yard line at football games, surrounded by young athletes. Kennedy has lost at the district and circuit levels; he moved to Florida in 2019, which technically should have rendered his case moot. But the supreme court agreed to hear his case anyway. This week, they ruled in his favor, 6-3.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist