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Jax Mayor Lenny Curry: FHSAA prayer prohibition is “cockamamie”

By By A.G. Gancarski , Floridapolitics.com, 12/05/15, 4:30PM EST

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Jacksonville’s University Christian won its 2A state football title game this week, but Mayor Lenny Curry is concerned about more than the scoreboard.

On Twitter in the last twenty four hours, he called the banning of the pregame prayer to be broadcast over loudspeakers before the game between University Christian and Tampa’s Cambridge Christian “absurd,” “cockamamie,” and “ridiculous that 2 private Christian schools were denied the right to pray before the game.”

Roger Dearing of the FHSAA justified the prohibition on the grounds that the game was played at a “public facility, predominately paid for with public tax dollars,” which made the facility “off limits” for public prayer due to “federal guidelines and precedent court cases,” saying also that the FHSAA was a “state actor” that couldn’t “legally permit or grant permission” for said prayer.

I asked Curry, on Twitter, about the “church and state” separation that statute seemed to require, and he stuck to his guns, saying that because the game involved “2 private Christian schools,” there “would have been nothing to see here.”

“Now — Repeat. Cockamamie,” Mayor Curry emphasized.