Supreme court bars student-led prayer at high school football games

Supreme Court has ruled that student-led prayers at public high school football games violate the separation of church and state. The only restriction is the students must be juniors or seniors with no disciplinary record. Thomas said the district allows students to say whatever they want. Sometimes it's a prayer, and other times students just welcome fans to the game, he said. Government controls the pre-game program, the stadium, the public address system and the voting process.

The school requires attendance at the game for some students and encourages it for all. The reasonable observer accurately perceives these prayers as having the government stamp of approval on them.

The Santa Fe policy will result in coercion, control and compromise of prayer. However, that should not be interpreted as our not desiring a favorable decision in this case, with the accompanying admonition from the court for greater efforts to be made to accommodate as diverse a student expression during the school year as there is diversity in the student body. Doe should be announced in early summer. The policy was challenged in court in by the families of Mormon and Catholic students, who objected to the religious, principally Baptist tone of the prayers coming from student speakers.

The families were allowed to go to court anonymously because of fears of intimidation. Eventually, the federal appeals court ruled against the school district. The same appeals court had ruled in an earlier case, 's Jones vs. Clear Creek, that religious invocations could be used at graduations, and only graduations, as long as they were non-sectarian and did not "proselytize," urge listeners to adopt a particular religious viewpoint.

The Supreme Court refused to review that ruling. But this time around, the appeals court ruled in the Santa Fe case that a public school policy permitting "sectarian, proselytizing benedictions and invocations cannot pass constitutional muster," and "extending a Clear Creek prayer policy to cover messages delivered before a high school football game violates the Constitution, even if such a policy includes the 'non-sectarian, non-proselytizing' restrictions.

The school district then asked the Supreme Court for review. The justices granted review only on the issue of football games and similar events, not graduations.

That separate issue must wait for another case in another term. Lawyers for the plaintiffs and the school district were not immediately available for comment on the decision. The current Supreme Court has been steadfast in its objection to large prayer ceremonies in government-funded schools.

In the Lee v. Weisman case, the court said no to a rabbi's prayer at a public middle school. The next year, the Supreme Court refused to hear the Jones v. Clear Creek Independent School District case, in which the lower court allowed "non-sectarian, non-proselytizing, student-initiated, student-led" prayers at graduation ceremonies.

The Santa Fe case was filed to challenge both the Supreme Court's decision to reject the Jones case and to void the Santa Fe district's policy.

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