A Florida-based Christian high school is appealing a district court decision that forbade it from having a prayer broadcasted before its football team’s 2015 championship game. Cambridge Christian School of Tampa and University Christian School of Jacksonville were denied the right to offer a prayer over the loudspeaker when they faced each other at the Citrus Bowl stadium in Orlando.
The First Liberty Institute filed a brief on behalf of Cambridge (whom they are representing) before the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In the introduction of the brief, First Liberty argued that the Florida State High School Athletic Association’s (FHSAA) denial of the schools’ request for a loudspeaker prayer was a matter of “viewpoint discrimination.”
FHSAA head Roger Dearing told the schools that the Citrus Bowl “is a public facility, predominantly paid for with public tax dollars, [making] the facility ‘off limits’ under federal guidelines and precedent court cases.”
–Adapted from The Christian Post .
