Since 1934, a small cross has stood in a remote area of California’s Mojave Desert. The Veterans of Foreign Wars erected the cross on federal land as a memorial to American soldiers who died in battle. The cross served as a reminder of the ultimate price paid by many soldiers in defense of our country, just as there are crosses on tombstones in federally maintained Arlington National Cemetery, Chattanooga National Cemetery and many others.
But in recent years, federal courts said the cross in California was an affront to the U.S. Constitution and had to be removed. Even an offer to transfer the land to the VFW in exchange for five acres of VFW land did not placate the courts, which said the cross had to go.
That was a bizarre reading of the Constitution’s First Amendment, which forbids establishment of a state religion but gives broad protection to free, non-coercive religious expression. A memorial on federal land to America’s war dead certainly did not create a state church.
Fortunately, the U.S. Supreme Court has now upheld constitutional principles of free religious expression and rejected lower court rulings ordering the removal of the cross.
“Here one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.
The only distressing thing about the ruling is that it was handed down by only the narrowest 5-4 margin, with the four most liberal justices predictably dissenting. It’s a shame the ruling was not unanimously in favor of permitting the cross to stay.