In 2015, Cambridge Christian School in Tampa won the right to play in the state championship football game against another Christian school from across the state. Both traditionally pray over the loudspeaker before kickoff, allowing players and fans to share a collective moment before the game.
Cambridge and its opponent asked the Florida High School Athletic Association for permission to do this before their championship game.
Attorney Jeremy Dys of First Liberty Institute, the law firm representing Cambridge Christian School, says they were told no because prayer is "religious," and a case called Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe does not allow religious speech to go across a public loudspeaker, as it could be deemed government speech.
"So, 10 years later, here we are at the Supreme Court asking the court to reverse that Santa Fe decision and not allow the 11th Circuit, as they did, to drag out again this offshoot of the Lemon case which died under Kennedy v. Bremerton to be used now to suppress religious speech and private speech going over a loudspeaker over a football game," Dys relays.
The petition asks:
(1) Whether Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe compels a finding of government speech where two private Christian schools sought to engage in communal prayer over a loudspeaker before a football game organized by a state athletic association that otherwise permitted a wide array of private speech over the loudspeaker and should therefore be overruled in light of this Court's later holdings in Matal v. Tam (2017), Shurtleff v. City of Boston (2022), and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District (2022), and
(2) Whether the endorsement factor of the government-speech doctrine revives Lemon's "endorsement test offshoot" that "this Court long ago abandoned" by providing a special veto for a private party's religious speech on any government owned platform.
If the Supreme Court takes the case, it would be heard in the 2025-2026 term that begins in October and runs through June of next year.
