(CNSNews.com) - A federal appeals court ruling Thursday affirmed the rights of Florida public school students to choose a classmate to give a prayer at high school graduation.
The court's ruling is "fundamentally different" from that of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that student-led prayers at public school football games in Santa Fe, Texas were unconstitutional because they were officially sanctioned.
The Catholic League applauded the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals' ruling.
Patrick Scully, spokesperson for the Catholic League, said the main difference between the two rulings is that "this one as opposed to the other one is a clear-cut free speech case."
"In Texas," he said, "what they did was they put together a provost by which a student-prayer would be lead, and a student would be chosen to lead the prayer. In this particular case, they're just picking a valedictorian and then not regulating what the person says."
The students aren't actually sanctioning what the speaker can or cannot say, Scully said, they're simply choosing the speaker and leaving the message up to him or her. The school itself does not dictate that.
The ruling is a victory both for free speech rights and the right to express one's religion, he said.
"The people who scream separation of church and state should the student decide to mention God, are the same people who defend their right to curse God if they wanted to, because that's free speech," Scully explained.
"In other words, religious speech is not second-class speech, and a student cannot be forced to censor his or herself of religious speech if they're chosen to speak at the particular event," he said.