By Mark Sherman
Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has signaled a greater willingness to allow religious symbols on public land, a stance that could have important implications for future church-state disputes.
By a 5-4 vote last Wednesday, the court refused to order the removal of a congressionally endorsed war memorial cross from its longtime home atop a remote rocky outcropping in California’s Mojave Desert.
The court directed a federal judge to look again at Congress’ plan to transfer the patch of U.S. land beneath the 7-foot (2-meter)-tall cross made of metal pipe to private ownership.
Federal courts had rejected the land transfer as insufficient to eliminate constitutional concern about a religious symbol on public land — in this case in the Mojave National Preserve.
While the holding Wednesday was narrow, the language of the justices in the majority, and particularly the opinion of Anthony Kennedy, suggested a more permissive view of religious symbols on public land in future cases.
Federal courts currently are weighing at least two other cross cases, a 29-foot cross and war memorial on Mt. Soledad in San Diego and Utah’s use of 12-foot-high crosses on roadside memorials honoring fallen highway patrol troopers.
“The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion’s role in society,” wrote Kennedy, who usually is in the court’s center on church-state issues.
Speaking of the Christian cross in particular, Kennedy said it is wrong to view it merely as a religious symbol.
“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,” he said.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens agreed that soldiers who died in battle deserve a memorial to their service. But the government “cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message,” Stevens said.
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