WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court's conservative majority signaled a greater willingness to allow religious symbols on public land Wednesday, a stance that could have important implications for future church-state disputes.
By a 5-4 vote, the court refused to order the removal of a congressionally endorsed war memorial cross from its longtime home atop a remote rocky outcropping in California's Mohave Desert...
"The Constitution does not oblige government to avoid any public acknowledgment of religion's role in society," wrote Kennedy, who usually is in the court's center on church-state issues.
Speaking of the Christian cross in particular, Kennedy said it is wrong to view it merely as a religious symbol. "Here one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten," he said.
I understand where Kennedy is going here and am grateful for the ruling, but I don't really agree with the assertion often made by defenders of public displays of crosses, who usually repeat something along the lines of what Kennedy is saying here. "The cross has a meaning that goes beyond religion, etc..." as though the religious aspect of the cross is secondary, even inconsequential to our secularized construct of that symbol. In fact, the cross is first and foremost, and at its core, a deeply religious symbol that should be respected by the state as such. We shouldn't have to dilute the significance of the cross so that it conforms to a secular, symbolic standard that we then impose on it.
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