Students at Loyola Academy, a Catholic school in Illinois, pray together after winning the 8A high school championship in 2015. Six weeks after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of a praying football coach and clarified its stance on school prayer , a separate but related case came one step closer to the justices’ desks when a Christian school in Florida advanced its fight to pray over the loudspeaker at state championship games. The new case, which is currently awaiting action from the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, stems from a Florida High School Athletic Association policy that bars loudspeaker prayers in publicly owned stadiums even when a game involves two religious schools. The association “claims that all speech over the loudspeaker is government speech” and that it therefore can’t convey a religious message, according to Cambridge Christian School’s appeal to the 11th Circuit . That appeal was necessary after the district court ruled against the school in April, deciding that the association can prevent Christian schools from accessing the loudspeaker without violating their religious freedom rights. The case “is not about whether two Christian schools may pray together at a football game,” the ruling said, according to […]
