I'm confused as to what the image is implying.
That's from the case of Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, in which Alito (
just today) wrote a concurring opinion that Kennedy - pictured above leading the team in prayer - was engaged in a private activity (albeit while at work) and engaged in it in purely a private capacity and therefore any requests by the school to moderate the behavior (while attempting to offer reasonable alternatives) - much less disciplining him for failure to abide by said requests constituted a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.
Sotomayer wrote a dissenting opinion that her colleagues were misconstruing the facts by characterizing Kennedy's actions as quiet and private prayer rather than a repeated public demonstrative event at the 50-yard line in which he invited student athletes and others to join in as he led the prayer in a way that led the school to fear that Kennedy's conduct created the impression that the school was endorsing a particular religion in violation of the Establishment Clause (Bremerton being a public school).
The case itself had further shown that in the time he had been doing this before it came to the board's attention, it had gone from him simply praying on the 50-yard line immediately after shaking hands with the other team to him explicitly inviting the other coach and players to join him and added post-game talks in which Kennedy would hold players' helmets aloft (see again the image) and deliver religious speeches that he characterized as prayers while the players kneeled around him. Students would later attest to feeling socially pressured to join in so as not to be separated from the rest of the team.
When asked to stop, he briefly prayed in private before ultimately lawyering up and claiming that he was "motivated by his sincerely held religious beliefs to pray after every game", characterized his kneeling in the field as his private time, and asked that the District "issue a clarification that the prayer is Kennedy's private speech" and that the District had no right to interfere with him, and he absolutely would resume the practice the very next day for the Homecoming game...at which point he immediately made multiple media appearances to advertise that fact and cast it as a fight for religious freedom. The resulting circus resulted in the school getting numerous threats, and the usual suspects storming the field after that game to join Kennedy in his prayer. When the school responded that this was unacceptable and that they'd be happy to accommodate his faith privately in a way that didn't interfere with his duties or create the impression of religious favoritism, his attorneys told the media that only option acceptable to their client was demonstrative prayer on the 50-yard line immediately after the game.
And after a few more games continuing this, he was put on paid administrative leave, and later was not rehired during his annual review due to his failure to follow district policy, lack of cooperation with the administration to find a reasonable accommodation that wouldn't put the District in a bad spot, and ultimately creating a dangerous environment for his fellow faculty and students (the head coach explicitly resigning out of fears that Kennedy's stoking public outrage to support his demonstrations would lead to him or his staff being shot or otherwise attacked). Kennedy responded by filing suit claiming that it was a violation of the Free Exercise clause, which the lower courts consistently ruled was a crock of hooey, noting specifically that not only had Kennedy abjectly rejected accommodation, but that he had further indicated that it was essential that his speech be delivered in the presence of students and spectators, which the courts held as performed in his capacity as a public employee (thereby conveying official sanction and thus violating the Establishment Clause).
Sotomayer called out the majority opinion as misrepresenting that as a private exercise of religion ("pray[ing] quietly while his students were otherwise occupied") when it was in fact a public display of what constituted ministry while still operating in his role as a representative of the School District. She even went so far as to characterize it as going "beyond merely misreading the record. The Court overrules Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U. S. 602 (1971), and calls into question decades of subsequent precedents that it deems 'offshoot' of that decision", and functionally replaces the Establishment Clause with a toothless version of the coercion analysis. In effect, she makes no secret of the fact that that the majority reads to her like a radical alteration to the Court's Religious Clauses Jurisprudence all while pretending that nothing has changed at all.
The Tweet follows up on that by basically accusing Alito of rank hypocrisy, as explained in the follow-up tweet: "On Friday, Alito could not find a right to privacy that had been in place for 50 years when it came to abortions, but on Monday writes a separate concurrence *just to say* that the separation of church and state can be whittled away based on a (false) claim of prayer privacy"
