Sharp debate at high court over cross on US land

WASHINGTON (AP) -- As the Supreme Court weighed a dispute over a religious symbol on public land Wednesday, Justice Antonin Scalia was having difficulty understanding how some people might feel excluded by a cross that was put up as a memorial to soldiers killed in World War I.

"It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead," Scalia said of the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built 75 years ago atop an outcropping in the Mojave National Preserve. "What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.

"I have been in Jewish cemeteries," Eliasberg continued. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia...

You can read the entire transcript of the oral arguments here.

NPR: High Court Weighs Legality Of Memorial Cross

A white cross erected on a rock outcropping on federal land in California's Mojave Desert is at the heart of a Supreme Court case about the government's display of religious symbols.

Critics say the cross violates the Constitution's ban on government establishment of religion. The case will be argued Wednesday.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars' Death Valley post first built the cross at Sunrise Rock in 1934 to honor Americans who died in combat in World War I. The most recent version of the cross was erected 11 years ago by a man named Henry Sandoz.

Neither the VFW nor Sandoz ever owned the land where the cross is located — nor did they have permission to build on the land.

But in 1999, a Buddhist asked the National Park Service for permission to erect a Buddhist shrine on federal land near the cross. The agency refused, setting in motion a series of events in the courts and Congress, culminating in Wednesday's Supreme Court hearing.

Justice Sotomayor's first Church and State decision: Salazar v. Buono (orals begin 10/07/2009)

On October 7th 2009 the Supreme Court of the United States will hear oral arguments in what will be Justice Sotomayor's first Establishment Clause case as a Justice. This case is also a growing battleground in what already is a major fight involving all the usual groups aligning for and against this application of one of our most cherished and important legal principles, the Separation Church and State.


The Case:
Salazar v. Buono, 08-472
http://origin.www.supremecourtus.gov/docket/08-472.htm

Petition for a writ of certiorari was granted by at least four Justices on Feb 23 2009.

Ten Commandments removed from Jackson Co. courthouse

Displays of the Ten Commandments in the Jackson County Courthouse have been removed in an effort to help resolve a federal lawsuit.

The county has not filed a response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit that says nine framed displays throughout the courthouse were a violation of First Amendment rights of co-plaintiff Eugene Phillips Jr.

Taking the displays down "will be a big step in getting that resolved," County Attorney George T. Hays said.

According to the lawsuit, Jackson Judge-Executive William O. Smith and the county fiscal court authorized the displays of the commandments in 1999 for "no secular purpose."

Sotomayor, religious freedom and the great unknown

President Barack Obama's nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the U.S. Supreme Court has triggered considerable hand-wringing on both sides of the culture-war divide over the relationship between religion and government under the First Amendment.

Weeks before Obama's announcement, Jay Sekulow of the conservative American Center for Law and Justice launched a preemptive strike, warning his constituents that Sotomayor has a "very, very strict view of church-state separation." Advocacy groups on the left can only hope Sekulow is right. They worry that Sotomayor won't compensate for the loss of Justice David Souter, a reliable vote for a high wall of separation in case after case.

Souter and his fellow separationists didn't win often on the current Court, but they managed to score an occasional 5-4 victory.

Further thinning of their ranks would make it difficult, if not impossible, to muster five votes for a strict interpretation of the First Amendment's establishment clause.

Unless Sekulow has a secret document that will reveal all, Sotomayor's long judicial record on the U.S. District Court level and, since 1998, on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tells us next to nothing about how she views the relationship between church and state. On the establishment clause, she is the great unknown.

More

Obama is right to reach out to nonbelievers

President Obama's mention of "nonbelievers" in his inaugural address represents an important broadening of the circle of acceptability in American life, an acknowledgement of our growing diversity and a fuller embrace of the principles articulated in our nation's charter documents.

One of the hallmarks of American life, dating to the 17th century, is its religious pluralism.

The Atlantic seaboard during the colonial period was home to everyone from Puritans, Roman Catholics and Dutch Reformed to Quakers, Baptists, Presbyterians, Swedish Lutherans, Anglicans, Huguenots, Mennonites and Schwenckfelders. Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in 1654, refugees from South America after the Portuguese takeover of Recifé.

Somehow it all worked, especially in the crucible of religious pluralism in the Middle Colonies: New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where William Penn launched his "Holy Experiment" of religious toleration.

In the context of the New World, these religious groups learned to coexist with remarkably little conflict, and when it came time to configure the new nation, the founders in their wisdom elected not to designate any group as the state religion.

"Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," the First Amendment to the United States Constitution reads.

This provision set up a kind of free market for religion in America, allowing religious groups to compete in a marketplace unfettered by government interference. Indeed, American history is littered with religious entrepreneurs (to extend the economic metaphor) who have peddled their wares in this marketplace and thereby contributed to the vigor and vitality of American religious life...

More here: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/02/04/balmer.nonbelievers/index.html

About the author: Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest, is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a visiting professor at Emory University. His most recent book is "God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush."

"Freedom of Conscience"

“At one time it was thought that this right merely proscribed the preference of one Christian sect over another, but would not require equal respect for the conscience of the infidel, the atheist, or the adherent of a non-Christian faith such as Islam or Judaism. But when the underlying principle has been examined in the crucible of litigation, the Court has unambiguously concluded that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all.” WALLACE v. JAFFREE, 472 U.S. 38 (1985).