Before the U.S. Supreme Court is a lawsuit about a large cross atop a rocky outcropping in a remote part of California’s Mojave Desert. Originally erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars as a memorial to fallen WWI soldiers, it is on a federal preserve under the authority of the U.S. Park Service.

Whether the cross is permissible is not the new or precedent setting type of question the Court usually takes up to clarify the law, and the case is rather old, with a twisted history leading to an unusual question for the Supreme Court — so why is the Court deciding it?  I think it is to make a more dramatic change in the law through the effect of a decision on standing: more on that below.

The Cross in Dispute. Credit: Eric Nystrom

Two courts, trial and appellate, decided in 2002 and 2004 that  display of the cross on…

A case argued recently before the U.S. Supreme raises a pair of questions: What, exactly, does a cross symbolize, and what does the placement of the cross mean?

The case, Salazar v. Buono, centers around a simple five-foot cross on federal land in the Mohave Desert, erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ Death Valley Post 2884. A plaque explaining that the cross stood “in memory of the dead of all wars” is now missing.

Undated photo made available by the Liberty Legal Institute shows the "Mojave Cross" on Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve, in Calif. Henry and Wanda Sandoz / Liberty Legal Institute / AP

Justice Antonin Scalia thought it absurd that a cross erected by a veterans group on Federal land only honors Christian soldiers.

“I don’t think you can leap from that (the assertion that the cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of…

The Supreme Court case about the cross in a remote part of the Mojave National Preserve is itself a monument–a monument to changing times.

The cross placed in the Mojave National Monument in 1934. Photo by the Associated Press.

The simple white cross was erected in 1934 by the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Death Valley Post 2884. A plaque accompanying the cross dedicates it to the memory of the dead of all wars. It is similar in design to the crosses we’ve all seen in photographs of the cemetery fields in France.

Fellow blogger Leigh Hunt Greenhaw has said she’ll approach the legal issues inherent in whether the cross’s placement violates the First Amendment’s requirements for the separation of church and state. (the “establishment clause”). There are other issues as well, which are covered in the story published in the Post-Dispatch last week. My own opinions are based not on the fine points…

I’m not necessarily a fan of Keith Olbermann–I don’t know enough about his work–but his commentary last week in support of marriage equality and love says everything I believe, and much better than I could say it: