Separation of Church and State: What Did the Founders Intend?
September 17 is Constitution Day, commemorating the adoption of the United States’ founding document as supreme law of the land. It is an important date in Boston, which played such a pivotal role during the Colonial period and the U.S. Revolutionary War that it earned the moniker “Cradle of Liberty.” The city gave our nation eight of its Founding Fathers. Home of the Boston Tea Party, seat of the Colonial government, and center of trade and commerce in New England, Boston witnessed the onset of the war on its outskirts at Lexington and Concord. It is also the birthplace of one of the oldest existing warships: the USS Constitution.
An impressive 305-foot long, wooden-hulled, triple-masted frigate, “Old Ironsides,” as she is known, docks in Charlestown Navy Yard in Boston’s National Historical Park, surrounded by wartime reminiscences such as Paul Revere’s house, Bunker Hill, and the Old North Church. On Constitution Day, amid tours, re-enactments, and historic exhibitions, her rigging is lined with brightly colored pennants, waving gaily in brisk Atlantic gusts. Across the Charles River, where patriots rally on the steps of City Hall to commemorate our nation’s founding, American flags flutter in the same breeze, but one banner remains curiously censored: the Christian Flag.
“The flag sends an overt religious message, and could reasonably be construed to be an endorsement of Christianity by the City, which would be a violation of the Establishment Clause,” wrote Mayor Martin Walsh in a statement explaining why Boston has refused a civic group’s repeated requests to fly the Christian flag during their one-hour rally each Constitution Day. Harold Shurtleff and his Camp Constitution organization filed suit, but a U.S. District Court upheld the city’s ban in February.
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