WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether public school districts can give students a virtually unfettered right to participate in student-led group prayers at football games.
Setting the stage for its first school-prayer ruling of the new millennium, the court said it will review decisions that struck down a Galveston County, Texas, school board's policy as a violation of the constitutionally required separation of church and state.Its decision, expected by late June, could help clarify the jumbled state of the law surrounding school prayer.
The 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, binding law in Louisiana and Mississippi as well, conflicts with another federal appeals court's decision barring student-led graduation prayers in nine Western states.
Among other court action Monday, the justices:
Turned away a dispute over the rights of homosexuals raising families. The justices, without comment, refused to review a groundbreaking decision in which Massachusetts' highest court said a lesbian who for years helped her partner raise a son had become a "de facto" parent entitled to visitation rights when the two women split up.
Declined to hear Juan Raul Garza's challenge of his death sentence for three Texas murders in the early 1990s. Garza is one of 20 men, including Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, awaiting federal execution at a prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Garza was convicted under a federal drug-kingpin law, which imposes capital punishment for murder resulting from large-scale illegal drug dealing.
Rejected a case in which Minnesota officials sought authority to investigate whether the Minnesota Twins conspired with other professional baseball teams to boycott cities that don't provide taxpayer-financed stadiums. The Minnesota attorney general's office began its investigation in 1997 after Twins owner Carl Polhad announced he would sell the team to a North Carolina partnership if state lawmakers did not authorize public funding for a new stadium.