WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday said a lower federal court was wrong to order the removal of a lone cross on government land in the middle of the Mojave Desert and said separation of church and state “does not require eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm.”
The case, which involved a white cross erected by veterans more than 75 years ago to honor the dead of World War I, splintered the court. The court’s conservative members prevailed, but six of the nine justices wrote to explain their views.
It did not provide a clear rule for the future — or even explicitly say that the cross could remain in place.
“To date, the court’s jurisprudence in this area has refrained from making sweeping pronouncements, and this case is ill suited for announcing categorical rules,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy.
But he wrote that the cross “is not merely a reaffirmation of Christian beliefs.”
He added: “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.”
Kennedy wrote that Congress had probably corrected any problem with the cross being on public land by agreeing to swap a small portion of the rock outcropping on which it stands to a veterans group, which has said it will maintain the site as a memorial.
A federal court in California, where the cross is located in the vast Mojave National Preserve, had said the land swap was an “illicit” way for the government to get around a ruling that the cross violated constitutional protections against government endorsement of religion. Kennedy’s opinion told the lower court to reconsider Congress’ action.
