Whether Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe compels a finding of government speech where two private Christian schools sought to engage in communal prayer over a loudspeaker before a state-organized football game

When two Christian high schools made it to a championship football game organized by a state athletic association, they sought to use the stadium loudspeaker for a brief pre-game prayer, consistent with their belief in, and long practice of, communal prayer. Just three years earlier, the association permitted one of the schools to use the loudspeaker for pregame prayer at the same championship in the same stadium. This time, the association denied the request solely because, in its words, permitting the prayer would be “viewed as endorsing or sponsoring religion” and thus violate the Establishment Clause as interpreted by Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe , 530 U.S. 290 (2000). Petitioner, Cambridge Christian School, sued for violation of its free-exercise and free-speech rights. In court, the association maintained that the prayer would have constituted government endorsement but shifted away from its Establishment Clause reasoning, arguing instead that the prayer was government speech. The courts below credited this argument, holding that two Christian schools using the loudspeaker to engage in communal prayer before a state-organized football game would be engaged in government speech. The Eleventh Circuit reached this conclusion despite record evidence showing the loudspeaker was regularly used for a wide array of private speech. The questions presented are: 1.Whether Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe , 530 U.S. 290 (2000), compels ii a finding of government speech where two private Christian schools sought to engage in communal prayer over a loudspeaker before a football game organized by a state athletic association that otherwise permitted a wide array of private speech over the loudspeaker and should therefore be overruled in light of this Court’s later holdings in Matal v. Tam, 582 U.S. 218 (2017), Shurtleff v. City of Boston , 596 U.S. 243 (2022), and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District , 597 U.S. 507 (2022). 2.Whether the endorsement factor of the government-speech doctrine revives Lemon ’s “endorsement test offshoot” that “this Court long ago abandoned,” Kennedy , 597 U.S. at 534, by providing a special vetofor a private party’s religious speech on any government owned platform.