A Christian school from Tampa has gone to the U.S. Supreme Court in a battle about whether the Florida High School Athletic Association violated First Amendment rights when it blocked the school from offering a prayer over a stadium loudspeaker before a 2015 high school football championship game.
Cambridge Christian School will ask the Supreme Court to overturn a decision last year by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that sided with the FHSAA.
The school will file a petition with detailed arguments by June 6, after Justice Clarence Thomas last week granted a request to extend a filing deadline. In the extension request, Cambridge Christian attorney Jesse Panuccio wrote that the petition will address “important and far-reaching issues” raised by a three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based appeals court.
The panel, in a 52-page decision issued in September, concluded that announcements over the loudspeaker at the 2015 game were “government speech,” as they were scripted and controlled by the athletic association. It said blocking a prayer over the public address system did not violate free-speech rights.
“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 in the extension request at the Supreme Court, Panuccio, who served as general counsel to former Gov. Rick Scott, cited legal precedents in disputing the appeals court’s conclusion.
“One way state actors suppress religious speech is by claiming all speech is government speech. As this (Supreme) Court has warned, the government-speech defense is ‘susceptible to dangerous misuse’ and courts ‘must exercise great caution before extending … government-speech precedents.’ Thus, to avoid unconstitutional religious discrimination, courts must closely scrutinize ‘the details’ of the platform at issue when a government claims all speech as its own,” Panuccio wrote, partially quoting from two Supreme Court opinions.
The 11th Circuit eschewed that "great caution," significantly reshaping the government-speech inquiry in ways that "contravene controlling precedent.”
The full appeals court in February declined to hold a hearing to reconsider the issue.
The case stems from a championship game at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium 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, the appeals court decision said. 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 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.
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.”
