Separation of church and state is certainly a bedrock principle for maintaining a liberal society, but once you get lawyers and anti-religious extremists involved, the principle sometimes gets twisted into absurd shapes.
In Eugene, Oregon, for example, the city has forbidden firefighters from putting up Christmas trees in city-owned fire stations on the grounds that it constitutes a violation of the separation of church and state. What nonsense. Even firefighter Matt Steinberg, who tells Fox that he is Jewish, understand what is really going on here,
I just shook my head and thought it was too bad that it had come down to that. What we’re really striving for is blandness. It’s not like people are running around being particularly religious all the time.
We’ve gone as a nation from rightly ensuring that our government doesn’t tell us how to worship to persecuting people who want to put a cross or Star of David or, god forbid, a Christmas tree in their workplace. This reminds me of the sort of absurd extremes that groups like the American Atheists used to go to with their regular claims that “In God We Trust” on coins violated the First Amendment.
Moreover, these bizarre edicts will over time tend to erode support among Americans for the principle of separation of church and state. A few weeks ago another case made the news when crosses were removed from a World War II memorial in a national park because various groups had threatened to sue on First Amendment grounds. This sort of nonsense does nothing to protect religious freedom in the United States, but adds to the growing perception among some religious people that the separation doctrine is largely a club used by liberal and left wing groups to rid public life of religious expression altogether.