Overdoing separationism

Culture warriors on either side go to absurd extremes.

A 40-Foot Cross Has Honored War Dead for 90 Years. Is It Unlawful?

Five miles from the United States Supreme Court, a 40-foot-tall World War I memorial in the shape of a cross has stood for nearly a century. 

Now, it is at the center of a battle over the separation of church and state that may end up on the court’s docket.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit declared this month that the Peace Cross, which sits on state-owned land in Maryland and has been maintained with public funds, was unconstitutional, a ruling that supporters of the monument warned could result in a “cleansing” of memorials on public grounds across the country.

The monument to the dead of The Great War, of the county in which it stands, was paid for by private money but sits on a bit of otherwise not used or much useful public land.

The court decision seems absurd and lends too much weight to disestablishment and not enough to free exercise.

Doubtless this complicates the issue.

The monument was erected in 1925 with funding from local families and the American Legion, but the state obtained title to the cross and land in 1961, and has spent at least $117,000 to maintain them.

So, why not divest?

This is ridiculous.

Douglas Laycock, a religious liberties scholar and professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, praised the decision.

The cross “asserts the truth of one religion and, implicitly but necessarily, the falsehood of all other religions,” he said. 

“Its secondary meanings, as in honoring war dead, are entirely derivative of its primary meaning as a symbol of the Resurrection.”

True enough, but it's not actually the state that did the asserting, but the people who built the thing.

And it's their right to do that that's at issue, too.

If the Fourth Circuit denies a request for the full court to reconsider the panel’s decision, defenders of the monument vow to take the case to the Supreme Court. 

They argue that the ruling sets a dangerous precedent, threatening national treasures such as the 24-foot Canadian Cross of Sacrifice and 13-foot Argonne Cross in Arlington National Cemetery — both within the Fourth Circuit’s jurisdiction — as well as the ground zero “cross,” the steel beams discovered among World Trade Center debris now on display in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

Come to that, what about all the individual grave markers in all our national cemeteries?

Most of them, like most cemetery monuments everywhere, reflect the religion of the person buried beneath them.

“It is brooding hostility toward religion, a sort of cleansing,” said Kelly Shackelford, the president of First Liberty Institute, one of the legal groups aiding the American Legion in defending the cross. 

“We would immediately need to begin massive bulldozing and sandblasting of veterans memorials across the country in a way that most people would find inconceivable.”

In his Fourth Circuit dissent, Chief Judge Roger L. Gregory, first appointed by President Bill Clinton, argued that the Establishment Clause “does not require the government ‘to purge from the public sphere’ any reference to religion.”