"Get over it," you can easily imagine any number of federal judges responding. "(H)urt feelings differ from legal injury," the 7th circuit Court of Appeals recently declared, rejecting a challenge to the President's declaration of National Prayer Day. Federal courts are increasingly unsympathetic to claims of emotional harm caused by government religiosity, denying standing to aggrieved plaintiffs characterized and trivialized as "offended observers" in establishment clause cases; (I discussed this trend here.) So the injury claims advanced by American Atheists are puzzling. Perhaps, by alleging stress related somatic injuries, the plaintiffs hope to demonstrate that they are not merely offended. Good luck with that: exaggerating the effects of the alleged offense only makes it easier to deride. Or perhaps plaintiffs are too enveloped by their pain to understand the folly of relying on it, or too immersed in the therapeutic culture to question whether their allegations of psychic harm are of great, constitutional import.

But government displays of sectarian religious symbols do raise important constitutional issues, not because of the risible personal harms alleged by American Atheists but because of the harms they inflict on the public sphere. When the government endorses or adopts the symbol of a majority religion it implicitly but effectively diminishes tolerance and threatens liberty for religious and irreligious minorities. It conveys a theocratic bias. When the government displays a Christian cross in a museum memorializing an epochal attack by violent Islamist extremists, the bias resonates with particular force, buttressing an extremist view of America as a Christian country, whose motto should not be E pluribus unum, or even "under God," but "what would Jesus do."

This is not mere ceremonial deism, like the vapid, non-sectarian references to God that decorate our currency and pepper presidential speeches. An official cross, like an official prayer to Jesus, is not deism but sectarianism. It violates constitutional prohibitions on official religious favoritism (the establishment of religion) not because it gives a few atheists indigestion but because it threatens everyone's religious freedom.

This is one danger we face today: with a conservative Supreme Court majority strongly supportive of church/state partnerships and indifferent, at best, to establishment clause violations, aspiring Christian theocrats are blurring the line between deism and sectarianism. A federal judge in Texas recently rejected a challenge by the Freedom from Religion Foundation to Governor Rick Perry's Christian prayer rally, which was successfully defended as non-denominational and compared to the non-sectarian national prayer day - as if a non-denominational Christian event were the equivalent of a non-sectarian one.