The US Supreme Court has declined to hear a case involving a Florida Christian school that challenged a state athletic association’s decision to block the school from offering a prayer over the loudspeaker at a championship game.
In the case of Cambridge Christian School, Inc. v. Florida High School Athletic Association, the Supreme Court denied a request for oral arguments without comment, The Christian Post reported.
It is a case that stretches back ten years. In December 2015, Cambridge Christian and University Christian School played a state championship game at the Citrus Bowl Stadium. Both teams requested permission to pray over the loudspeaker before the game, but the FHSAA rejected the request.
FHSAA leaders argued that the Citrus Bowl is a “public facility, predominantly paid for with public tax dollars”. Because of this, the facility is considered “off limits” under federal guidelines and precedent-setting court cases.
“In Florida statutes, the FHSAA (host and coordinator of the event) is legally a ‘State Actor’; we cannot legally permit or grant permission for such an activity,” said Roger Dearing, executive director of the Florida athletics group.
Cambridge Christian filed a lawsuit against the association in 2016 with the help of the First Liberty Institute. Then, in 2017, US District Judge Charlene Edwards Honeywell sided with the FHSAA, concluding that prayer over the loudspeaker would have constituted government speech, ultimately violating the First Amendment.
Two years later, a three-judge panel of the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed Judge Honeywell’s ruling. Circuit Judge Stanley Marcus said the district court had been “too quick to dismiss” the school’s claims, adding that its claims for relief under the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses had been “adequately and plausibly pled”.
The case was sent back to Judge Honeywell, who ruled against Cambridge Christian again in April 2022. A different three-judge 11th Circuit panel upheld the district court’s decision in 2024.
“Because we conclude that the FHSAA was regulating its own expression when it restricted pre-game speech over the PA system at the 2015 football championships … Cambridge Christian’s free exercise claims fail,” said Circuit Judge Ed Carnes in the unanimous panel.
The school’s lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court in July, stating that “the prayer requested cannot be government speech because the only view to be expressed would have come from Cambridge, not the FHSAA”.
Jeremy Dys, senior counsel at First Liberty, criticised the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear the case.
“The Eleventh Circuit’s decision to label the prayer as government speech abandons the foundational promises of the First Amendment that are meant to guarantee individual freedom,” he said.
Since the initial incident, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed legislation, in 2023, that explicitly allows sports teams to give brief opening remarks before high school athletic events, including prayer.