TALLAHASSEE — A Tampa Christian school is continuing a legal battle over a 2015 decision by the Florida High School Athletic Association to prevent the school from offering a prayer over a stadium loudspeaker before a high-school football championship game.
Attorneys for Cambridge Christian School this week asked the full 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to take up the dispute about whether the athletic association’s decision violated First Amendment rights.
The school’s motion for what is known as an “en banc” hearing came after a three-judge panel of the appeals court on Sept. 3 upheld a district judge’s ruling in favor of the athletic association.
The panel, in a 52-page opinion, concluded that announcements over the loudspeaker at the game between Cambridge Christian and Jacksonville’s University Christian School 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.
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“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,” said the opinion, written by Judge Ed Carnes and joined by Judges Gerald Tjoflat and Britt Grant. “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 the school’s motion filed Tuesday at the Atlanta-based appeals court disputed the government-speech argument.
“Nearly a decade ago, a bureaucrat decided that allowing two Christian schools to audibly pray in a stadium would breach the ‘separation of church and state.’ It may seem like a trifle to some. … But for CCS (Cambridge Christian School), and others subjected to religious discrimination by officials high and low, defending the right ‘to live out their faiths in daily life’ is no small matter,” the motion said, partially quoting a U.S. Supreme Court case. “The (panel) opinion threatens not just to bless FHSAA’s constitutional violation, but to invite many more through a retrogressive distortion of the First Amendment rights the Supreme Court has recently been so determined to protect.”
The motion pointed to other content, such as advertising and remarks from schools, that have been read over public-address systems at championship events.
“En banc review is needed to prevent this (11th) circuit from becoming a retrograde haven for state-sponsored religious discrimination under the guise of an all-consuming government-speech doctrine,” the motion said.
The long-running case stems from the 2015 championship game at Orlando’s Camping World Stadium. While the athletic association, a non-profit governing body for high-school sports, prevented the use of the loudspeaker, the teams from the two schools prayed on the field before and after the game, according to the panel opinion. Those prayers could not be heard by people in the stands.
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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. In 2022, she issued a judgment in favor of the athletic association, 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 panel 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.”
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