Left’s Persistent Myth on ‘Rewriting Facts’ in Kennedy v. Bremerton

In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District that a school district violated the Free Exercise and Free Speech rights of a high-school football coach when it disciplined him for praying quietly after three games. Ever since the Court’s ruling, the Twitter-verse has been rife with ill-founded claims that Justice Gorsuch’s majority opinion rewrote the actual facts of the case. Folks making this claim have routinely cited the photographs that Justice Sotomayor included in her dissent.

I now see that Stanford law professor Mark A. Lemley makes this same claim in an online essay for the Harvard Law Review Forum. Lemley nakedly asserts:

In Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, the Court took the remarkable step of rewriting the facts of the case, ignoring what actually happened (as found by both the district court and the court of appeals and documented with photographs), and writing its own (false) set of facts to tell a more favorable story for the outcome it wanted to reach.