By Joan Biskupic
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 27, 2000; Page A02

On a balmy Texas evening last September, as her high school's football team was ready to play its season opener, Marian Ward strode to a microphone to lead the crowd in prayer. Dressed in her green and gold band uniform, Ward, then a 17-year-old senior, was initially overcome by emotion as she began asking the Lord to bless the game.

Just hours before the game, a judge had issued an order allowing Ward's invocation despite a new school district ban on religious messages at football contests. Previously the district had allowed prayer at football games.

Cheered on by the stadium crowd, Ward, the daughter of a Baptist pastor, prayed for good sportsmanship, then said: "Be with the fans, that they will exemplify good behavior, as well, Lord. . . . Bless this evening."

Pre-kickoff prayer over the loudspeakers, a ritual inseparable from Friday night football in towns across Texas and elsewhere, is before the Supreme Court this week. The case focuses on the gridiron, but its outcome could influence the larger debate about prayer in public schools and reveal the court majority's inclinations in the delicate balancing of government and religion.

Not since 1992 have the justices confronted prayer at school, one of the most divisive subjects in the nation's enduring struggle over the place of religion in public life. Such larger tensions were seen in the backlash to Texas Gov. George W. Bush's appearance at Bob Jones University and in controversy over the selection of a new chaplain for the House of Representatives.

Among the justices, church-state cases tend to be bitterly fought and often come down to a single vote. Though the justices have narrowed the focus of the case, perhaps to increase the chances for accord, some advocates who support a high wall of separation between church and state are concerned that if prayer is allowed at games, that could be used as a precedent for permitting it at other school events.

Bush himself has entered the Supreme Court dispute, signing a brief--filed by Texas officials and supported by seven other states--that says a ban on invocations at games unconstitutionally discriminates against religious speech.

Ward is not a direct party to the case now before the court, though she is one of the numerous interested parties who submitted "friend of the court" briefs in the dispute. But a ruling in the case the justices will consider--Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe--will touch the lives of students such as Ward who want to be able to pray at school events, as well as those who protest such influences at their schools.

"I go to school to learn. I don't go there to express my religious views," said Amanda Bruce, who was a classmate of Ward's last fall. Bruce, a Catholic who refused to attend football games because of the pregame prayer, called Ward's speech an affront to "every other faith that does not pray to Jesus or God."

The high court case traces to 1995 when two families, Catholic and Mormon, sued the Houston-area district, claiming that school officials engaged in Christian proselytizing and challenging prayer at graduations and football games. When the justices announced last November that they would review the case, they narrowed the legal question--without explanation--to the district policy on football prayer.

But the case is plainly being viewed for its broader potential. Scores of organizations from across the country--including religious groups, civil libertarians, education officials and members of Congress--have added their voices.

When the high court took up the subject eight years ago, it ruled by one vote that prayer at a public school graduation violated the First Amendment's dictate that government "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." In that Rhode Island dispute, the court emphasized that school officials had organized the prayer exercise and that students were obligated to attend the graduation ceremony.

Advocates who want students to be able to express their religious sentiments believe the justices will see this case differently because it involves an extracurricular event and prayer organized by students themselves.

In 1992, "the assumption was that the state was the speaker," said Jay Alan Sekulow, of the American Center for Law and Justice, who represents the school district. "This is almost the mirror opposite. Students vote on whether to have a message at games."

University of Texas law professor Douglas Laycock, who with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union represents the challengers, said that irrespective of who organizes the prayer, students are required to sit through it, violating their constitutional rights. Laycock observed that Texas football is "a rite of passage" that students miss only at the risk of social banishment.

The Santa Fe policy at issue permitted students to vote on whether they wanted to offer some pregame message, religious or secular, to "solemnize" the event and promote good sportsmanship. The students chose who would deliver the message.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit struck down the practice last year, ruling that any policy that allows proselytizing benedictions and invocations did not pass constitutional muster. The court also looked at a revised district policy that would require the messages to be "nonsectarian and nonproselytizing" but concluded that under no circumstances could pre-kickoff prayer be proper for a high school football game.

"Football games . . . [are] hardly the sober type of annual event that can be appropriately solemnized with prayer," the court asserted.

In its appeal of the 5th Circuit court's ruling, the Santa Fe Independent School District stresses that while the football policy doesn't exclude religious messages, it doesn't specifically promote them, either. The appeal says it's up to each student to decide what to say over the loudspeaker. The district relies on past Supreme Court cases emphasizing the difference between government speech endorsing religion and private speech endorsing religion. The former is forbidden by the Constitution; the latter is protected by it.

Lawyers for the two families that have challenged the policy counter that even though the school asks the students to vote on whether to have some message, religious or otherwise, at games, the policy is designed "to achieve a single, majoritarian answer . . . and to impose that answer on everyone in the school."

If students were allowed to vote for prayer at games, they claim, they could vote for prayer at other extracurricular events and eventually seek it in the classroom--a practice that would violate the Supreme Court's 1962 prohibition on organized school prayer.

Students such as Ward are hoping for a ruling that allows greater religious expression at public school events. "My personal belief is that God calls for public acknowledgment in every part of our life," she said. Among the outsiders who have submitted briefs on the side of stadium prayer are more than 20 members of Congress, including Republican Reps. Steve Largent and J.C. Watts, both of Oklahoma and former football players. All but one of the members, in fact, are Republicans.

On the other side, a handful of faith-based and civil liberties organizations, led by the American Jewish Congress, warn that government-sponsored religious exercises "hurt religious believers as well as nonbelievers."

"In communities sensitive to religious minorities, government involvement in religious activity leads inevitably to watered-down 'nonsectarian' prayer, satisfying to few who take their religious commitments seriously," wrote former U.S. solicitor general Walter Dellinger. "In other communities, official sectarian prayers track outright the beliefs of the dominant sect, excluding local religious minorities and making them outsiders in their own schools and towns."