School Prayer Defended by Officials in Oklahoma and Arkansas

Attorney General Scott Pruitt
Attorney General Scott Pruitt speaking at the 2015 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. Pruitt has defended the Ten Commandment monument on the Oklahoma State capitol grounds and prayer in public school sporting events. |

In Oklahoma and Arkansas, officials are taking a stand to keep prayer in public school sporting events.

Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt issued a formal statement on a policy recently approved by the Oklahoma Secondary School Activities Association, the group that oversees the sporting events. The group enacted a policy that prohibits student prayer at school sporting events.  

"You just can't uniformly, arbitrarily say, "We are going to allow all speech except religious speech,' and that is why it is overboard," said Pruitt, arguing that policy is too broad.

Another school district in Ashdown, Arkansas has been under scrutiny from the anti-Christian group, Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The group is claiming that the district is violating the constitution by allowing prayers by the school's band director as well as at football games, threatening to take legal action.

Ashdown School District Superintendent Jason Sanders, however, disagrees with FFRF and believes that no laws have been broken.

"We feel like that the freedom of our students to express themselves will hold up in a court of law, We're not going to stop any student who wants to exercise their freedom of religious expression such as a prayer," Sanders told Christian Broadcasting (CBN).