At issue: Should students be allowed to deliver prayers to the crowd before football games?

November 15, 1999
Web posted at: 3:22 p.m. EST (2022 GMT)

In this story: Lower courts ruled out prayer at school football games Case goes to the Supreme Court Previous Supreme Court rulings on school prayer RELATED STORIES, SITES

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Supreme Court will tackle a legal dispute over student-led prayers at football games. Justices agreed Monday to decide whether a Texas school district that allowed students to participate in pre-game prayers violated the constitutionally required separation of church and state.

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The Santa Fe Independent School District appealed to the Supreme Court after losing lower court rulings. The high court will hear arguments before the end of April, with a decision due by the end of June.

Sante Fe, near Galveston, has a largely conservative Christian population. Under a temporary federal court order issued in September, students can continue with pre-game prayers through the remainder of the current football season.

The district's policy of allowing students to deliver any "message" or "invocation" over the public address system at home football games and to lead prayers at graduation ceremonies was challenged in 1995 by students and their parents from two families -- one Catholic, one Mormon.

Monday's brief order limited the Supreme Court's review to the issue of prayers at football games.

A federal judge ruled that the two policies -- for football games and commencement ceremonies -- were permissible only if students were told to keep their messages and prayers "nonsectarian and non-proselytizing."

School officials and six students challenged that ruling, and a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals restricted the school district's policies even more stringently last February.

The appeals panel agreed that school officials must tell students to keep their graduation-ceremony comments and prayers "nonsectarian and non-proselytizing," but also ruled that such student-led prayers at high school football games are always out of bounds.

By a 2-1 vote, the appeals court panel said football games are "hardly the sober type of annual event that can be appropriately solemnized with prayer."

The full 5th Circuit court voted 9-7 in April against reviewing the panel's decision.

Those opposing the prayers say they pressure people into religious conformity

In their appeal to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the Santa Fe Independent School District said the Constitution's treatment of religion is "better honored through the neutral accommodation of student viewpoints, whether they be sectarian, ecumenical or religion-free, rather than through government censorship of the content of student prayers."

The school district's appeal was supported in a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by Texas and eight other states -- Alabama, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina and Tennessee.

The families who successfully challenged the school district's policy urged the justices to reject its appeal, saying it makes some feel like outsiders in their own community because of their religious views.

"The fact that graduation prayer or prayer before football games is led by students does not diminish the pressure to religious conformity. If anything, it may increase it," they said.

The Supreme Court's last major school-prayer ruling was announced in 1992, and barred clergy-led prayers -- invocations and benedictions -- at public school graduation ceremonies. "The Constitution forbids the state to exact religious conformity from a student as the price of attending her own high school graduation," the court said then.

The ruling was viewed by many as a strong reaffirmation of the highest court's 1962 decision banning organized, officially sponsored prayers from public schools.

But in 1993, the justices refused to review a federal appeals court ruling in a Texas case that allowed student-led prayers at graduation ceremonies. That appeals court ruling, which is binding law in Louisiana and Mississippi, conflicts with another federal appeals court's decision barring student-led graduation prayers in nine Western states.

Senior Washington Correspondent Charles Bierbauer, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.