{"id":9447,"date":"2010-08-25T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2010-08-25T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/08\/25\/federal-judges-say-utah-crosses-illegal\/"},"modified":"2010-08-25T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2010-08-25T12:00:00","slug":"federal-judges-say-utah-crosses-illegal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/2010\/08\/25\/federal-judges-say-utah-crosses-illegal\/","title":{"rendered":"Federal Judges Say Utah Crosses Illegal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcmontana.com\/news\/24693896\/detail.html\">www.nbcmontana.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p>MONTANA, U.S., August 19, 2010: The 14 crosses erected along Utah roads to commemorate fallen state Highway Patrol troopers convey a state preference for Christianity and are a violation of the U.S. Constitution, a federal appeals court said Wednesday.<\/p>\n<p>The ruling reverses a 2007 decision by a federal district judge that said the crosses communicate a secular message about deaths and were not a public endorsement of religion. It&#8217;s the latest in a recent rash of mixed-bag rulings on the public use of crosses.<\/p>\n<p>The 12-foot high white crosses with 6-foot horizontal crossbars are affixed with the patrol&#8217;s beehive logo and a biography of the deceased trooper. First erected in 1998, monuments were paid for with private funds and erected only with the permission of the troopers&#8217; families. Nearly all of the 14 crosses are on public land.<\/p>\n<p>In 2006, the Utah Legislature passed a joint resolution declaring the cross a nonreligious secular symbol of death. But American Atheists, Inc., the Texas-based group that sued to have the crosses removed from state property, argued that the crosses could imply that the trooper who died there was a Christian. Justices agreed and said that while the cross is a widely recognized symbol of death, it is a specific Christian message.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Source: www.nbcmontana.com MONTANA, U.S., August 19, 2010: The 14 crosses erected along Utah roads to commemorate fallen state Highway Patrol,&#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-9447","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447","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=9447"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9447\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9447"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9447"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hinduismtoday.com\/hpi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9447"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}