Attorneys are ready to go to the Supreme Court to keep a 55-foot cross standing on public property in a Michigan town.
Americans United for Separation of Church and State has protested the cross in Frankenmuth, Michigan, which was erected in 1976 for the Nation's Bicentennial celebration. Richard Thompson of the Thomas More Law Center tells OneNewsNow it was also intended to point to the city's founding as a Native American mission colony in 1845.
"Actually, the settlers came in from a province in Germany," he notes. "They were prompted to do so by a German Lutheran priest who wanted to evangelize the Indians in the area and also provide some missionary work for the Germans who were already there."
The community was highly religious, and its members spread the gospel exactly as they had intended to do. In 1976, a bicentennial committee decided to put up a cross.
"[It was] to reflect a grateful city for the early settlers and obviously to thank God for America -- in fact for religious freedom," Thompson explains.
The TMLC president asserts that the cross does not establish a government religion and does not violate the Constitution. Even so, after more than 30 years, Americans United is complaining on behalf of an unidentified atheist.