I’m generally pretty worthless today as per posting here at the site, because tonight is the Louisiana Freedom Caucus PAC’s Legislative Summit dinner, and naturally that means a big crush to get the guest list worked out and the other logistics squared away.

If you’re in Baton Rouge and you’re not doing anything tonight, sign up and stop by. We still have a handful of tickets left.

Trying to write things, including the speech I’m going to give tonight, is a challenge when the phone won’t stop ringing and buzzing.

So I’m saddling you with this idiocy brought by the militant atheist mob at the Freedom From Religion Foundation. A press release…

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is calling out the Jefferson Davis Parish Schools system in Jennings, La. for using a Christian cross on official district athletics attire.

A concerned community member informed FFRF that the Lacassine High School boys’ basketball team warm-up gear features a cross on the back, additionally noting that these shirts are worn during games.

FFRF contacted the district after learning of this constitutional violation.

“Religious imagery on official school attire sends the message that the district is promoting religion,” FFRF Patrick O’Reiley Legal Fellow Hirsh M. Joshi has written to Jefferson Davis Parish Schools Superintendent John Hall.

It is well settled that public schools may not show favoritism towards or coerce belief or participation in religion. A public school may not use religious imagery to demonstrate favoritism toward Christianity — as the district does here. Further, having minor children wear religious imagery on their assigned uniform may infringe their free speech rights, especially if they would be retaliated against for refusing to wear a Latin cross.

FFRF also points out that student athletes are especially susceptible to coercion. When their school’s athletic program assigns uniforms featuring religious imagery, the students undoubtedly feel that wearing those images is essential to pleasing their team’s coach. That places athletes in a difficult position: They must either express that religious message — against their conscience — or openly dissent at risk of their standing. That ultimatum is exactly what the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause guards against.

Religious coercion occurring within the district is particularly troubling for those parents and students who are not Christian or who are nonreligious. Nearly half of Generation Z (those born after 1996) is nonreligious, which may be quite a few of the district’s athletes

FFRF asserts that in order to respect the First Amendment rights of students, the district must instruct the athletics department to refrain from using religious imagery on official athletic gear.

“The school district has a constitutional obligation to remain neutral regarding religion,” FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor says. “The district must not include religious iconography on student athletics attire in order to create an environment welcoming to all students — whether they are religious or nonreligious.”

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with over 42,000 members, including more than 100 members in Louisiana. FFRF’s purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between church and state, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.

This will, of course, be a major stink and end up in federal court.

Lacassine won the Class B state championship in boys’ basketball. If they hadn’t, it’s almost a guarantee that nobody would have said anything about the little crosses on their warm-up jackets. The “concerned community member” almost certainly isn’t in Lacassine; had that been the case this would have come to light sooner and the militant atheists would have thrown a fit during basketball season rather than a month after it ended.

So they’re going to go after a little country high school whose basketball players are almost certainly all Christians and like having a cross on their warm-up jackets.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll win their court case.

Except the current Supreme Court is not exactly fully on board with the militant atheist point of view. If you’ll remember the case out of Washington State three years ago in which the Supremes overturned the firing of a high school football coach for praying at the 50-yard line after his games, that was a good indication of the direction things are moving.

And the Louisiana Ten Commandments case will be at the Supreme Court soon, which could very well blow out the Lemon test by which school districts are prevented from having any reflections of Christianity (“religion,” generally, but it’s only ever really enforced against Christians).

Not to mention there’s a case in front of the Supreme Court today which could open the door to school systems openly contracting with Christian schools to educate public school kids…

Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond will determine whether St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School can contract with the state of Oklahoma and receive public funds. The case could expand the use of public funds on religious schools when it is decided later this term.

It’s a case that’s split Republicans into several camps, and it’s getting close attention from lawmakers outside of Oklahoma and religious-rights groups.

“The court is a very hard body to predict,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who filed an amicus brief in March in support of the school, told NOTUS. “I really do not have a good sense of how they’ll come out of this. Obviously, they granted it, which is, I think, fantastic.”

While lawmakers go about their business on Capitol Hill this Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on behalf of the school from lawyers, including some affiliated with the Alliance Defending Freedom and from Notre Dame Law School’s Religious Liberty Clinic. Gregory Garre, a former solicitor general, will argue on behalf of Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who has said the school could “force taxpayers to fund all manner of religious indoctrination.”

This whole “separation of church and state” stuff is a load of crap anyway. The Founders never intended the doctrine to be used as it has been by the militant atheists; what they wanted to avoid was the establishment of a state religion by Congress. They didn’t even have a problem with the states establishing one; at the time, Maryland was the Catholic state.

And while the militant atheist crowd points to Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury church as proof of his hostility to mixing religion and government, they fail to recognize the fact that every Sunday Jefferson attended church services inside the U.S. Capitol when he was president.

Anyway, let’s hope that the folks in Lacassine, and the Jefferson Davis Parish school board, tells the Freedom From Religion Foundation to do something anatomically impossible. Let them sue, and let’s see if they win. Because if the coach and the players of a high school basketball team want to put a cross on their warm-up jerseys, rather than, say, a picture of Tupac Shakur or a monster truck (the FFRF clowns wouldn’t give a fig about those two things), then it’s really only the truly obnoxious anal-retentive anti-Christian leftists who’ll actually care.

And right now, truly obnoxious anti-Christian anal-retentive leftists need to be racking up some L’s.

We’d like to see them rack one up against the Class B state basketball champions.