The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up an appeal by Tampa's Cambridge Christian School, which contended its speech rights were violated when it was prevented from offering a prayer over a stadium loudspeaker before a 2015 state championship football game.
The Supreme Court, as is common, did not explain its reasons. But the decision effectively was a victory for the Florida High School Athletic Association and let stand a ruling last year by a panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Attorneys for Cambridge Christian in June filed a petition asking the Supreme Court to take up the 9-year-old case, which stemmed from a championship game between Cambridge Christian and Jacksonville’s University Christian School at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium.
The FHSAA, a nonprofit 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.
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Cambridge Christian filed the lawsuit in 2016, and the dispute went to the Atlanta-based appeals court twice. In last year’s decision, a three-judge panel of the court concluded that announcements over the loudspeaker at the game were “government speech,” as they were scripted and controlled by the FHSAA. It said the FHSAA'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 the appeals court ruling as “egregiously wrong” and alleged potentially far-reaching effects if it was not overturned.
“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.
The FHSAA's attorneys, however, argued in a brief last month 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.
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In addition, the FHSAA pointed to a 2023 state law that required allowing high schools to offer “brief opening remarks” — which could include prayers — before championship events.
The FHSAA said the “problem (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.”
The appeals court panel 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.”
U.S. District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell initially dismissed the case in 2017, but the 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, which prompted another appeal by Cambridge Christian.
