{"id":8338,"date":"2009-10-12T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/10\/12\/supreme-court-debates-legality-of-cross-memorial\/"},"modified":"2009-10-12T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-12T12:00:00","slug":"supreme-court-debates-legality-of-cross-memorial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2009\/10\/12\/supreme-court-debates-legality-of-cross-memorial\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Debates Legality of Cross Memorial"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-na-court-cross8-2009oct08,0,2065193.story\">www.latimes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>WASHINGTON, DC, USA, October 8, 2009: The Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether a large Latin cross standing in the Mojave National Preserve is a symbol of all fallen soldiers&#8211;including non-Christians&#8211;and whether it violates the 1st Amendment ban on establishment of religion.<\/p>\n<p>The cross has existed since 1934 on a remote hill in the Mojave National Preserve. The National Park Service turned down a request to have a Buddhist symbol erected nearby, and a decade ago a former park employee charged that the government was inappropriately favoring one religion. When a lower court ruled that this stand-alone display was unconstitutional, Congress responded by transferring the cross (and the land under it) to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), a private organization. A later lower-court ruling established that Congress&#8217; action did not solve the problem.<\/p>\n<p>Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed as an &#8220;outrageous conclusion&#8221; the contention that the cross only honors the Christian dead. The Rev. Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, asks, &#8220;Is Scalia seriously arguing that the cross is no longer a religious symbol? Now that is an outrageous conclusion.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens noted that it was designated as a national memorial and that Congress had said it must be preserved to honor America&#8217;s war dead&#8211;if not, the land and the cross would revert to government control. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: www.latimes.com WASHINGTON, DC, USA, October 8, 2009: The Supreme Court debated Wednesday whether a large Latin cross standing in,&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8338","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8338"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8338\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8338"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8338"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8338"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}