feste_sylvain

Here's the problem: there's a big cross standing in the Mojave National Preserve in the California desert. It's ostensibly to honor war dead. And a National Parks employee is suing to get it removed, due to a fairly obvious violation of the separation of church and state.

And Justice Scalia is unfortunately not in "sage learned jurisprudence" mode; rather, he's in "frothing slavering reactionary" mode. He's making unsupportable assertions like:

I don't agree with you that any time the government allows a religious symbol to be to erected, it has to allow all religious symbols to be erected at the same place,

...as is done at Arlington National Cemetery.

Fortunately, Justice Ginsberg followed up that assertion with:

Is there any other national memorial that consists of a solitary cross?

However, this head-on assault is not the way to address this issue, IMHO. When the memorial cross was first erected, it was not on national preserve land. The Feds grabbed that land without knowing what was on it.

There is a bill wending its way thru Congress to transfer the memorial and the land parcel that it's on to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, which is not a governmental organization.

This should pass.

The fault is not with the memorial, but with the appearance of it being a government-sponsored memorial.