What shocking visual image inspires so much fear, disgust and outrage that even in this era of unfettered free expression, federal courts feel compelled to take drastic steps to cover it up?<\/p>\n
(Judges will rarely use their power to hide public sculptures depicting sadistic brutality, or to obscure billboards peddling sex and nudity, but in the California desert they’ve ordered the concealment of a simple white cross that has honored the nation’s war dead for more than 70 years.<\/p>\n
In 1934, the Veterans of Foreign Wars erected a monument on a barren hilltop known as “Sunrise Rock” in the Mojave National Preserve to commemorate “the dead of all wars.” More than a half-century later, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California challenged the memorial, claiming that it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the cross (recognized by the government as a war memorial) stood on public land. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the dismantling of the monument, but Congress took action in 2004 to authorize the transfer of the ground surrounding the cross to private parties.<\/p>\n
A federal district judge invalidated that transaction, even as officials responsible for the desert refuge took steps to hide the cross while the legal wrangling continued. Government agents covered the offending crossbeam with boards, making it look like a crude screen, or a shallow box, perched incongruously on a stick in the middle of the California desert.<\/p>\n
The absurd status of this ongoing struggle shouldn’t obscure its serious and alarming undercurrents including a common attitude among militant “separationists” that treats Christian symbols with more hostility and less tolerance than those of any other religious tradition.<\/p>\n