Charles C. Haynes: Graduation prayer, fighting over a lost cause

  School officials in Lake City, Arkansas have come up with a novel solution to the fight over prayer at graduation:

  No prayer, no graduation.

  On May 6, the school board voted to cancel sixth-grade graduation at Lake City’s two elementary schools. The action came soon after the district received a complaint letter from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) objecting to prayers at previous graduations.

Ken Paulson: When faith and football don’t mix

  You can throw a Hail Mary at a public school football game, but you can’t actually hail Mary. That distinction is at the heart of a flurry of incidents this fall in which public universities and high schools are being challenged for conducting prayers before football games. In recent months:

-The University of Tennessee-Chattanooga announced that it would no longer hold public prayers before football games, while the UT campus in Knoxville said it was retaining them at Neyland Stadium. The decisions came after accusations by the Freedom From Religion Foundation that the practice violates the separation of church and state.