Litigation

Supreme Court Keeps Mojave Cross Case Alive

By Peter Hardin

A fractured Supreme Court revived on Wednesday efforts by supporters to keep displaying a Christian cross intended as a war memorial in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve in California.

In a 5-4 ruling, the high court effectively upheld a federal law aimed at protecting the display, according to a Bloomberg article.

The court majority ordered a lower federal court to take another look at a Congress’s plan to transfer land beneath the cross from public to private ownership, the Associated Press reported.

The decision did not dictate a final outcome in the dispute. Yet it “strengthens the government’s hand to allow crosses and other religious symbols on public grounds,” according to a USA Today article.

“The goal of avoiding governmental endorsement does not require eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm,”  Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote.  “This cross,” he wrote, “evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles,” according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Justice Kennedy also made clear his own views of the land-transfer statute passed by Congress, a Washington Post article said. Justice Kennedy wrote, “The land-transfer statute embodies Congress’s legislative judgment that this dispute is best resolved through a framework and policy of accommodation for a symbol that, while challenged under the Establishment Clause, has complex meaning beyond the expression of religious views.”

A lower federal court had ordered removal of the cross and found the congressionally endorsed transfer an “illicit” step to circumvent a ruling that the cross was unconstitutional.

Justice John Paul Stevens dissented, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. He wrote,”I certainly agree that the nation should memorialize the service of those who fought and died in World War I, but it cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message.”

The cross was erected by the Veterans of Foreign Wars to honor fallen soldiers from World War I.

When the court heard oral arguments, a lawyer representing the American Civil Liberties Union contended the cross ?is the predominant symbol of Christianity? and ought not stand prominently in a national park.

U.S. Solicitor General Elena Kagan, however, maintained that the symbol is constitutional because Congress had turned control of the cross and land beneath it to the VFW. You can read earlier posts about the case in Gavel Grab.

Full post as published by The Gavel on April 28, 2010 (boomark / email).