This all changed in what legal scholar Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame calls the "secularization project" of the Supreme Court, beginning in the late 1940s. The justices enshrined Thomas Jefferson's idea of a "wall of separation between church and state," which, whatever Jefferson meant by it, has often been taken to mean zero accommodation for expressions of religious faith in public settings such as government offices, legislatures, and public schools. This secularist dogma has led some public officials to consider American citizens too sensitive and insecure in their own individual beliefs to risk exposing them to the differing beliefs of their fellow citizens, if the exposure is in a setting connected to civic authority. So in 1992, the Supreme Court invalidated the common practice of prayer at public high-school graduations, on grounds that someone hearing such utterances might feel discomfited by exposure to the prayers of a faith he does not share.
This kind of thinking may explain the action of Director Ocasio and her superiors at Veterans Affairs. In the name of extreme separationism, secularism, and hostility to sectarian faith -- all a misunderstanding of the Establishment Clause of the Constitution -- they have assaulted the religious freedom of veterans' bereaved families, at a time when many of them feel they most need to lean on God. This is not the Constitution our forefathers made for us. This is bad history, bad law, bad morality, and tone-deaf politics.