When the government buys property that for years has featured a memorial with a large cross on it honoring those killed in war, must it remove the cross to "separate church and state?"

Common sense says of course not, and the Supreme Court will hear arguments about it on Thursday. The case, which we've discussed before, involves a 40-foot memorial honoring 49 people of Prince George’s County, Md., who died in World War I. The apt words, “endurance,” “valor,” “devotion,” and “courage,” are inscribed on the memorial, which was paid for in 1919 with money raised by 10 mothers who lost their sons. In 1961, the town of Bladensburg bought the land for traffic safety improvements.

Now, three aggressive atheist groups say the cross must be eliminated because it is on government land and unconstitutionally is an “establishment of religion.” Tendentious drivel!

The government owns burial grounds everywhere, such as in Normandy, France, and Arlington National Cemetery, where thousands of graves are marked with crosses. Congress, state legislatures, and the armed services employ chaplains. The First Amendment does not prohibit voluntary or casual interactions with religion or religious symbols; it merely forbids the government from coercing people into specific denominational faiths or practices.

A cross to honor war dead, perhaps especially one that existed before the government owned the land, coerces nobody. What the atheist groups want is not to prevent the establishment of religion but to expand the state, and in doing so, to invoke the separation of church and state to force religion out of as many nooks and crannies of public life as they can. The First Amendment is not intended to be a club with which the state can smash the church. Indeed, the opposite is true; the amendment exists to make sure government lets religions flourish.

As two women whose uncles are memorialized by the Bladensburg cross wrote in a Washington Examiner op-ed on Tuesday: “The Celtic cross was a symbol of sacrifice, then and now. … It would be a tragedy of the highest proportions to destroy our uncles’ memorial or others like it. ... Destroy the Peace Cross and you rob the next generation of the memory of their historic sacrifice.”

If the "land of the free" is not to be a phrase uttered only with grim irony, atheists, while free to ignore religious symbolism, should not be allowed to harass religious people from the free exercise of their faiths, nor be permitted to despoil honorable symbols of tribute and love.

The memorial cross has served for 100 years as a unifying tribute to patriotic devotion. We hope and trust that the Supreme Court will recognize the atheists' suit as a baneful attack on freedom. In a way, the suit is frivolous, but not when it is acknowledged that it would, if successful, force another of the fine, gentle, honorable customs once central to our understanding of America to retreat yet further toward the fringes of our suffering culture.