No more plywood sheets hiding the Cross - great news!

Wow! Read this article for some encouraging news!

If you’re like many Christians, you’ve become frustrated as more and more of our religious liberty has been eroded by people who take offense at such scurrilous activities as prayer in schools… or a creche in the town square… or the words “one nation under God”… or Catholic hospitals that don’t perform abortions. But take heart, because the Supreme Court has refused to order the removal of a cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars placed in the Mojave Desert in 1934 to honor the dead from the first World War.


Evidently Frank Buono, a retired National Park Service employee, brought suit on the grounds that the cross represented a religious symbol. Mr. Buono took exception to the existence of a single 7-foot cross in a remote portion of the 1.6 million acre Mojave Desert; it was his position that the cross should not be allowed on public land. The location was so remote, in fact, that one of the justices quipped that it was likely that the cross had been seen by more rattlesnakes than human beings.


At any rate, a lower court agreed with Mr. Buono, and the cross has been covered with plywood for the past several years as the case traveled up the judicial ladder to the Supreme Court. At some point along the way, Congress developed a plan to transfer ownership of the tiny fraction of desert underneath the cross to private ownership. Federal courts rejected this idea; saying that this land transfer is “insufficient to eliminate constitutional concern about a religious symbol on public land”.


The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s decision by a 5-4 vote. Justice Stevens, one of those who dissented, said that the memorial in the Mojave is a “dramatically inadequate and inappropriate tribute.: He went on to say that although fallen soldiers do, indeed, deserve a memorial, the government can’t continue to endorse a “starkly sectarian message” (i.e. a cross) in order to do so.

On the other hand Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “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.” The cemetery in Normandy (pictured here) immediately comes to mind.


Justice Kennedy then wrote something that is music to my ears: “The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgement of religion’s role in society.” And I think he hit on something important here. There’s a vast difference between promoting religion and recognizing its existence and its importance in the fabric of most of our lives.

I would not want to see government promotion of a specific religion, but it would be every bit as wrong for our government to maintain an anti-religious stance. And frankly, I'm glad that someone took the time to memorialize the men who lost their lives in service of our country. And if people of other faiths (or no faith at all) want to do so, there are nearly 1.6 million square miles of Mojave Desert land still remaining.

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