The U.S. Supreme Court is going to take up a case involving a war memorial cross that has stood for 75 years in the Mojave Desert of California. The plaintiff in the case, Frank Buono, and the ACLU say the cross violates the separation of church and state since it sits on what is now a government-owned national reserve.
In 1934, World War I veteran Riley Bembry erected the original Mojave Cross on a 4,000-foot plateau for war veterans who came to the desert to recover from lung diseases caused by mustard gas in the war. According to a New York Times editorial on Tuesday, the cross has had to be replaced several times. The one that stands now continues a tradition of honoring veterans, and an annual Easter service has been held there for decades.
But in 1994, the land the cross sits on became the property of the National Parks Service. Suddenly, the cross supposedly has become a violation of church and state.
The New York Times sided with the ACLU in the Tuesday editorial, saying, “A single cross does not, by itself, mean America has an established religion, but if the Supreme Court stops caring that the government is promoting a particular religion, we will be down the path toward having one.”
That is nonsense. America is nowhere near the path to having a state religion.
Opposition to this cross is representative of an obsessive-compulsive movement to sanitize America’s public culture of everything human. The fervor with which certain groups in America have tried to ban crosses, Christmas trees, “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and a myriad of other expressions is tantamount to the oppression of faith, not to mention cultural genocide.
The cross in question has been covered by a plywood box awaiting its final judgment, and if you see a picture of it, you wonder who doesn’t have anything better to do than go around boxing up religious symbols.
Recently, I’ve been watching a little bit of Ken Burns’ new documentary “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” on PBS, and I learned in some of the parks, there is actually ancient graffiti carved into the rocks by Indian tribes. Should we box them up, too, since some of them are religious?
There is only one understandable argument for opposing the Mojave Cross, which is that apparently the park service denied a Buddhist from erecting a memorial close by. This would potentially be against the First Amendment since it gives preferential treatment to a specific religious tradition.
However, the war memorial cross was in existence before the National Parks Service purchased the land. To me, it seems reasonable not to destroy pre-existing memorials, even while refusing to let more be built.
But it seems like the better route to take in this situation is not to attack the cross, but to defend the right of the Buddhist to establish his memorial if he has the right.
A few years ago in the Oak Lawn School District in Chicago, a Muslim mother wanted her child’s school to include Ramadan along with its holiday celebrations, including their usual Christmas and Halloween festivities.
Instead of adding Ramadan, the school board banned all school holiday celebrations, including their usual Christmas and Halloween festivities, which was never what the Muslim parent intended the board to do. Nonetheless, it caused uproar with the families and made the little kids worry since there was going to be no Santa that year. Controversies like this are unnecessary, and I think all sane people can agree. Add Ramadan, keep Santa and everyone’s happy. That’s what the Oak Lawn School District finally decided to do, and a similar mentality should be applied to the Mojave Cross controversy.
Groups like the ACLU that supposedly stand for liberty should stop crushing innocent expressions of religion in the public sector and focus on actual injustices and infractions on our freedoms.
Matt Watson is a graduate student majoring in Spanish. He can be contacted at [email protected].