As most of you have probably heard, there is a cross in the Memorial Union Chapel.

Last week, the Government of the Student Body discussed the possible removal of this cross.

This debate has been going on at Iowa State for years, and one of the most common arguments for the removal of the cross is the First Amendment, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof …”

Of course, you only have to read the first word of the amendment to find the obvious flaw in this logic: Congress and Iowa State are entirely different entities.

So even if, by some overwhelming stretch of the imagination, the failure to remove a cross from a state-sponsored university was actually an establishment of a religion, the First Amendment does not in any way, shape or form apply to this situation.

There is a law in Ames stating that people under the age of 21 cannot enter a bar, but no one in their right mind would try to argue that, by the same law, people over 21 cannot enter a bar.

Why? Because the law specifically states that it applies only to people under 21. Yet, for many, this logic somehow doesn’t seem to make the jump to the First Amendment.

Again, the key word here is Congress.

It is Congress, and Congress only, that the First Amendment does not allow to establish a religion.

Everyone else, any other entity, is allowed to. And if they’re not, it is not the First Amendment that says so.

The amendment specifically states that it only applies to Congress.

In fact, when our Constitution was ratified, many states actually had established religions. The last one, Connecticut’s establishment of the Congregational Church as the state church, was eliminated in 1818. Early Americans were afraid the other states, through the power of the federal government, would force the entire country to practice one religion as a whole rather than leaving religion as a state-wide issue.

The establishment clause simply reassured the states that the federal government would not interfere by overruling the rights of the states and imposing one religion on all as had been done in England for centuries.

In short, the idea was freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.

As the 10th Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”

Because of the First Amendment, establishment of religion is one of those things that falls under the category of “prohibited by it to the states.”

If the establishment clause didn’t apply to entire states establishing mandatory religions, it most definitely does not apply to Iowa State having one cross, in one room, in one historic building on a campus with hundreds of buildings and thousands of rooms.

There may be perfectly viable reasons why the cross should be removed, but the First Amendment is certainly not one of them.

– Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and economics from DeWitt, Iowa.