The Florida High School Athletic Association on Tuesday urged the U.S. Supreme Court to turn down an appeal by a Tampa Christian school in a battle about whether the school’s rights were violated when it was barred from offering a prayer over a stadium loudspeaker before a 2015 football championship game.
Attorneys for the association filed a 32-page document that said a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals correctly ruled last year against Cambridge Christian School. Also, the association pointed to a 2023 state law that required allowing high schools to offer “brief opening remarks” — which could include prayers — before championship events.
The association said the “problem CCS (Cambridge Christian School) brought this case to address has thus been solved in the constitutionally preferred way — not through a uniform national policy handed down by a politically insulated court, but through a local policy crafted by a responsive legislature and an energetic executive.”
“Put simply, religious freedom is well protected in Florida and will continue to be protected regardless of the outcome of this purely retrospective lawsuit,” the association’s attorneys wrote. “The issues in this case are undoubtedly important in the abstract, but the case’s outcome will not have any practical, forward-looking impact on the parties or the state of Florida.”
Cambridge Christian attorneys in June filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, arguing it "presents issues of utmost importance for religious liberty in this country," The association’s filing Tuesday was a response to that petition. It is unclear when the Supreme Court will decide whether to hear the case.
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The dispute stems from a championship game between Cambridge Christian and Jacksonville’s University Christian School at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium. While the association, a non-profit governing body for high-school sports, denied the use of the loudspeaker for a prayer, 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 association, which prompted another appeal by Cambridge Christian.
The appeals court said the 2023 state law made moot parts of the lawsuit but that it needed to rule on the First Amendment issues because Cambridge Christian sought “nominal damages.”
In last year’s decision, the appeals court concluded that announcements over the loudspeaker at the game were “government speech,” as they were scripted and controlled by the association. It said the association’s decision to block a prayer over the public-address system did not violate free-speech rights.
But the school’s petition filed at the Supreme Court described that appeals-court ruling as “egregiously wrong” and alleged potentially far-reaching effects if it is not overturned. The petition 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,” the school’s attorneys wrote.
But the association’s attorneys Tuesday argued that the appeals court correctly followed a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision involving the “framework for identifying government speech.” They also disputed the school’s contentions about far-reaching effects of the appeals court’s ruling.
“One thing high school athletics teaches is that, after coming up short, the temptation to say the game was rigged or impossible is hard to resist,” the association’s attorneys wrote. “Here, CCS’s insistence that, if its attempt to prove private speech failed every other plaintiff’s will, too, sounds more like sour grapes than a fair reading of the Eleventh Circuit’s opinion.”
