The U.S. Supreme Court has produced yet another partisan ideological screed masquerading as sober legal analysis. This time, the court's culture-war conservatives have sided with a high school football coach who led student players in prayer on the field at the end of games — an inherently coercive exercise against non-Christian players.

Yet the court's six conservatives ruled Monday that the coach's free-speech rights mandated he be allowed to use a publicly funded venue to promote a specific religious philosophy, during an official school function, while acting in his capacity as a school employee, with authority over the students he is leading in prayer. It would be difficult to intentionally construct a more obvious violation of the First Amendment's separation of church and state.

The claim by Joseph Kennedy, a former high school assistant football coach in Bremerton, Washington, that he has the right to pray wherever he wants isn't the problem. But praying at mid-field, during school events, and inviting players to join him, introduces elements of both officialdom and coercion to the exercise.

The coach claims participation wasn't a requirement, but in this context, that's irrelevant. The nature of the coach-player relationship makes pretty much anything the coach indicates that he wants, spoken or not, into a requirement. Such a public display of religiosity by a coach, with an invitation for students to join in, would require an equally public display of non-belief by any students who wanted to sit out the prayer — a display that would end up looking like rebellion whether that was the intention or not.

At least one student said he feared, quite reasonably, that refusal to pray might affect his playing time. That's the kind of real-world element to which the court's majority has chosen to turn a blind eye in recent rulings on gun restrictions, abortion rights and, now, the separation of church and state.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing the 6-3 majority opinion, described the school district's position prohibiting the prayer as "hostile to religion." To suggest that prohibiting government from promoting religion is tantamount to attacking religion is the same upside-down logic behind the GOP's broader mission to remove the church-state wall. That the court is now running plays from that partisan Republican playbook isn't coincidental.

In fact, in previewing this case in April, we suggested the constitutional problems here are so glaring that the eventual ruling would serve as a useful test of whether the court's conservatives are actually the unbiased constitutional originalists they strenuously claim to be, or just robed right-wing partisans who would shoehorn Republican policies into force with whatever legal arguments served the moment.

We now have our answer, in a ruling that Christian proselytizing to an effectively captive audience of public-school students is somehow consistent with religiously neutral government. In truth, the only consistency here is the partisan kind.

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