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Published: September 12, 2007

A constitutional offense

Court orders removal of veterans’ memorial cross

Last week's decision by the 9th Circuit Court to remove a solitary Roman cross from a World War I veterans memorial in California's Mojave Desert has drawn an angry response from the American Legion, a major association of U.S. veterans.

"Today's lawyers and judges are outlawing the values and religious symbols that the Founding Fathers revered and proclaimed as the very foundation of the American republic," Conatser, head of the 2.7 million-member American Legion, said in a recent press release. "Today it's a memorial. Tomorrow, these same judges can order the removal of crosses on veterans gravestones, the dismissal of military chaplains and the closure of base chapels."

The presence of a cross on public land as part of a veterans’ memorial has been disputed for a number of years by the ACLU. In 2004, an Act of Congress authorized transferring one acre of land, upon which the cross sits, to private ownership, in exchange for five acres of land elsewhere which would be given to the federal government, thereby effectively removing the cross from federal jurisdiction.

But almost 2 ½ years ago, a federal judge in Riverside forbade the exchange of federal lands for private lands in order to maintain the cross. Although the cross has been the center of the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial for three-quarters of a century, the judge ordered the executive branch to cancel the land exchange, retain the land and demolish the cross.

While this ruling was under appeal by the American Legion, the National Park Service covered the Mojave cross with a plywood box, so as to remove the “Constitutional offense.”

On September 6 the Ninth Federal Circuit Court of Appeals again ruled in favor of the ACLU and ordered the cross destroyed.

Conatser expressed indignation at a provision in the current law which allows the ACLU and other groups to collect millions of dollars in attorney's fees from the taxpayers, who, by and large, support the memorials.

"This is one more prime example of wrong-headed political correctness,” said American Legion National Commander Marty Conatser, “and one more critical reason why the current Congress must pass the Public Expression of Religion Act (PERA)."

The American Legion contends that PERA is needed to amend federal law to prevent the use of the legal system “in a manner that extorts money from state and local governments.”

"Passage of PERA would prevent the ACLU from mugging America's taxpayers in this manner," Conatser said. It's time for Congress to make this public law, before other veterans' memorials are literally desecrated at the whim of judges."

The American Legion was founded in 1919 to support veterans’ affairs and patriotic youth programs. The Legion's wartime veterans have more than 14,000 posts across the nation.

© California Catholic Daily 2007. All Rights Reserved.