Those sons-of-guns on the Supreme Court seem to have consciously waded into a number of more-controversial-than-usual issues for the coming term, going on a tear through the Constitutional Amendments, one by one. Regarding the First Amendment, the vehicle is the fight over the cross erected in the Mojave Desert 75 years ago to commemorate veterans of WWI. Because it stands now on "federal" land (a nature preserve), its presence has been challenged by the ACLU and others.
I'm not a deeply religious person (OK, to be honest, I'm not even a shallowly religious person), I am fully in favor of separation of church and state. Yet I've never been particularly offended by crosses in the desert (public land or not), or on gravesites; crèches at Christmas don't enrage me; and I can ignore the outward signs of other people's faith when they're not hitting me over the head with them. Maybe that's why I can see this case has nothing to do with the "separation" issue. This case doesn't belong in the Supreme Court, or in any court.
It's a matter of history. At the time this cross was erected in 1934, our society was far more religiously homogeneous than it is today; for those relative few who weren't Christian at that time (e.g. atheists, Jews, probably even a few Muslims), there wasn't much recourse. The dangerously quaint Justice Scalia (who by some accounts is exasperated by the suggestion that the cross does not symbolize a final resting place to Jews or Muslims) would have fit right in back then; his mode of thinking was the majority view. It isn't any longer.
It seems to me we have to let history be history. Throughout parts of the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire held sway for hundreds of years, Muslims obliterated the faces of ancient frescos in countless pre-Ottoman churches and monasteries; when the Ottomans took over "Constantinople" from the decaying Byzantine Empire, they turned the Cathedral of St. Sophia into a mosque (and later a museum); in 2001, in Afghanistan, the Taliban demolished the ancient Buddhas of Bamyan; and of course, throughout the U.S. and Europe, countless Jewish gravestones have been vandalized. Today, we consider these acts as desecration and intolerance.
Would the removal of this Mojave cross (or even some wacky transfer of ownership of the land) be any different? Not a whit. The ACLU and their allies are wrong on this one. But so is the Supreme Court, in taking up this case, if the Justices seek to draw any conclusions regarding the First Amendment or church-state separation.
It's a far different matter nowadays, when the issue is whether new religious imagery should be erected in/on property of the U.S. or a state government which is charged to represent all citizens. In 2009, the answer is clearly "no."
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