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The Supreme Court is expected to hear two consolidated cases this week focused on the “Peace Cross”, a cross-shaped World War I memorial located on state land in Maryland. The Peace Cross is at the center of a dispute over the separation of church and state in which the plaintiffs want the memorial modified or moved to private land.
Isaac Kramnick
Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government Emeritus
Isaac Kramnick, government professor emeritus at Cornell University, is an expert on American political thought and history and co-authored “The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State”, a book examining the place of religion in American political life.
Kramnick says:
“Not only are non-Christians ignored by this cross, but religious Christians should oppose the secularization of the cross in the Supreme Court case, as it holds this monument not to be a religious memorial but a secular testimony to the death of the soldiers named on it.
“Many religious figures have similarly opposed the federal court’s ruling that citing God in the Pledge of Allegiance is a secular ceremonial reference. God is God and a cross is a cross. Both reflect religious conviction. To rule otherwise is to demean religion in an effort to find the unconstitutional constitutional.”
