Arguing the case "presents issues of utmost importance for religious liberty in this country," a Christian school in Tampa wants the U.S. Supreme Court to take up a yearslong battle about whether the school should have been barred from offering a prayer over a stadium loudspeaker before a high school football championship game.
Attorneys for Cambridge Christian School last week filed a 37-page petition urging the Supreme Court to overturn a decision last year by a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which sided with the Florida High School Athletic Association.
The appeals court panel concluded that announcements over the loudspeaker at the 2015 championship game at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium were “government speech,” as they were scripted and controlled by the athletic association. It said the association’s decision to block a prayer over the public address system did not violate free speech rights.
But the petition filed at the Supreme Court described that ruling as “egregiously wrong” and alleged potentially far-reaching effects if it is not overturned. It cited other legal decisions and said the appeals court opened “the door for the reemergence of the very religious intolerance that this (Supreme) Court has endeavored to stamp out in a string of cases over the last two decades.”
“If the Eleventh Circuit’s boundless version of government speech stands, state actors will be able to claim that virtually all private speech and religious exercise in a government setting lacks First Amendment protection,” wrote the school’s attorneys, including lawyers from the Texas-based First Liberty Institute and Jesse Panuccio, a former general counsel to then-Gov. Rick Scott.
The case stems from a championship game between Cambridge Christian and Jacksonville’s University Christian School. While the FHSAA, a nonprofit governing body for high school sports, denied the use of the loudspeaker, the teams prayed on the field before and after the game. Those prayers could not be heard by people in the stands.
U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell initially dismissed the case in 2017, but the Atlanta-based appeals court in 2019 overturned the dismissal and sent the case back to Honeywell for further consideration. That led to Honeywell in 2022 ruling again in favor of the FHSAA, prompting another appeal by Cambridge Christian.
In last year’s decision, the appeals court panel pointed, in part, to the FHSAA's control over what was said over the loudspeaker.
“At the 2015 football finals, the only person who made announcements over the PA system at any point during the game was the PA announcer,” the appeals court decision said. “His announcements were entirely scripted (except for a halftime announcement about the game’s statistical leaders which, of course, couldn’t be scripted in advance). Every word of that script was put there by an FHSAA employee.”
But the school’s petition to the Supreme Court, partially quoting a 2022 precedent, said the appeals court decision “presents issues of utmost importance for religious liberty in this country. If the decision stands, it will be virtually impossible to overcome government speech defenses, and the government will again be empowered ‘to single out private religious speech for special disfavor.’”
“On virtually every doctrinal point, the decision below egregiously departs from this (Supreme) Court’s teachings,” the petition said. “If left standing, it presents a grave threat to religious speech and exercise.”
The FHSAA faces a July 10 deadline for filing a response to the petition.
Amid the case, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature in 2023 approved a law that required allowing high schools to offer “brief opening remarks” — which could include prayers — before championship events.
The appeals court said that made moot parts of the lawsuit but that it needed to rule on the First Amendment issues because Cambridge Christian sought “nominal damages.”
