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Well, the article uses a confusion of terms. Sometimes Mitchell's work is supposed to be making "crucifixes," sometimes it's "crosses." A "crucifix" is a cross with Jesus on it. Forming a corpus to put on each cross would certainly be complex enough to meet the expected challenge of the class, I would think.

Regardless, I don't think the real issue is that the work Mitchell is producing is too simple. Crosses or crucifixes, the "problem" is that he is making an obvious Christian symbol. The Tolerance Police simply will not tolerate that!

When will Christians of all types band together and put a stop to this nonsense? All one needs to do is point-out that, at the time of the Constitution's formulation and subsequent ratification, there were still five states with an "established religion." The last of them (Massachusetts) did not formally remove Congregationalism as the Established Religion of the Commonwealth until 1833! This means that, for over 40 years after the Federal Constitution went into effect, at least one state held to things like mandatory Christian belief for office holders, and taxes levied and collected for a specific denomination, and neither Congress nor the U.S. Supreme Court ever intervened. They did not, because they knew that the U.S. Constitution granted them no authority to do so! How, then, can anyone with a straight face say that the logical absurdities brought up in this thread can really find their origin in "Constitutional issues"?

Mind you, I don't think that states having established religions, religious requirements for office holders, and so forth, is a good idea. But that is not the point. The Constitution only prohibits Congress from establishing religions at the Federal level. Christians need to take the argument back from the relative handful of village atheists and other cranks and insist that all of this controversy based on a manifestly false set of premises come to an abrupt and permanent end!

Internal evidence that the problem was not the lack of complexity in the product: the professor comparing the cross to a swastika.

That means he was concerned about the ideological/philosophical content of the product, NOT that it was too simple to fulfill the course requirements.

Had he been concerned about that, he would have used your comparison to a "pancake".

That convinces me that this is a religious freedom issue, not a course requirements issue. The latter is simply a smoke screen invented by the administration (or their lawyer, as in, "You guys had better dream up a bona fide reason for this tout suite . . . or you're TOAST!")