In a NYTimes column, author and scholar Stanley Fish – who's written books about interpreting everything from the First Amendment to Milton – complains about the reasoning in Establishment Clause decisions like the Mojave Cross opinion just released last week by the Supreme Court.
Notice what this paroxysm of patriotism had done: it has taken the Christianity out of the cross and turned it into an all-purpose means of marking secular achievements. . . .It is one of the ironies of the sequence of cases dealing with religious symbols on public land that those who argue for their lawful presence must first deny them the significance that provokes the desire to put them there in the first place.
It has become a formula: if you want to secure a role for religious symbols in the public sphere, you must de-religionize them. . . . The operation is successful, but the patient is dead.
