The Florida House of Representatives approved a plan Tuesday to resolve a years-long dispute over the banning of a pregame prayer at a high school football game.

In 2015, the Florida High School Athletic Association prohibited two Christian schools from having a prayer broadcast over a loudspeaker prior to a state championship game at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando.

The proposal, included in an education bill, would set aside 30 seconds at the beginning of all athletic events for "opening remarks," which could include a prayer.

The athletic association would be barred from "controlling, monitoring, or reviewing the content of the opening remarks, requiring an announcement before the remarks that the association does not endorse the views or opinions presented."

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Fox News reported the state Senate has been considering the bill, which would need the governor's approval to become law.

Last November, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit reversed in part a lower court's decision that affirmed the rule prohibiting the pre-game prayer. The court said Cambridge Christian School's argument that its free speech and free exercise rights were violated had merit and should proceed.

The athletic association contended pre-game prayers violate the Establishment Clause in the Constitution, which prohibits Congress from passing any law "respecting an establishment of religion."

Fox News reported former Florida State University football coach Bobby Bowden and his son, former Clemson football coach Tommy Bowden, called the association's decision "confusing and frustrating."

"Why has the state's agency charged with administering high school sports spent hundreds of thousands of its dollars paying attorneys to prevent a simple, 30-second prayer by two Christian schools?" they wrote in a commentary Monday for the Talahassee Democrat.

They said the legislation seems like a "reasonable, even creative, solution."

Appeals court: Prayer is private, not government, speech

First Liberty Institute, which represented Cambridge Christian, said the FHSAA "suggested that because the stadium was city-owned and the FHSAA a state agency, it would violate the Constitution to allow two private Christian schools to pray over a state-owned microphone for less than a minute."

First Liberty went to the appeals court after a judge sided with the FHSAA in 2017.

The appeals ruling said: "As we see it, the district court was too quick to dismiss all of Cambridge Christian's claims out of hand. Taking the complaint in a light most favorable to the plaintiff, as we must at this stage in the proceedings, the schools' claims for relief under the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses have been adequately and plausibly pled.

"There are too many open factual questions for us to say with confidence that the allegations cannot be proven as a matter of law. The question of whether all speech over the microphone was government speech is a heavily fact-intensive one that looks at the history of the government's use of the medium for communicative purposes, the implication of government endorsement of messages carried over that medium, and the degree of government control over those messages.

"Here, the history factor weights against finding government speech and the control factor is indeterminate, so, based on this limited record, we find it plausible that the multitude of messages delivered over the loudspeaker should be viewed as private, not government, speech."

Both schools had asked for permission for the loudspeaker prayer.

The teams were able to meet on the field and pray before the game, but "fans were unable to hear."