Written by Don Byrd
A new twist in the long-running church-state controversy over the memorial cross on Mt. Soledad in California may come soon. The U.S. Senate is expected this week to pass the National Defense Authorization Act, a $585 billion defense spending bill, which includes an amendment added in the House transferring the land containing the cross to a private veterans group.
Courts have consistently found the memorial violates the separation of church and state during 20+ years of litigation over the site, first when the memorial site was on land owned by the city of San Diego, and later after the City Council transferred the land to the federal government. Most recently, a trial court judge ruled that the cross must be removed because no other proposed methods would pass constitutional scrutiny. That decision is on appeal at the 9th Circuit.
The LATimes reports this new congressional action may bring an end to the controversy, or may not.
Shifting the property to the memorial association, [Congressman Duncan] Hunter said, “alleviates the criticism that it is government controlled property.” The association, he said, is committed “to ensuring the memorial stands in recognition of our veterans.”
[Plaintiff’s attorney, James] McElroy said that the Mt. Soledad case could be influenced by a 2012 court decision that permitted a cross on National Park Service property in the Mojave Desert as long as the land was transferred to a veterans group.
But McElroy noted that the Mojave cross was small, located in a remote location, and was erected by veterans. The Soledad cross, by comparison, is large, highly visible in a big city, and was for decades a civic-sponsored effort.
In the 2010 ruling in Salazar v. Buono, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ruling invalidating a similar congressional transfer of land in the Mojave cross case, sending the dispute back to the trial court to determine the constitutionality of the cross in light of the transfer. That case later settled out of court.
