Federal courts are at it again with more judicial tyranny, and the founding fathers are surely turning in their graves.
The 4th Circuit Court ruled this week that a Maryland war memorial is unconstitutional because it’s in the shape of a cross.
Funded and maintained with taxpayer dollars, it apparently constitutes ‘establishment of religion’ because it promotes Christianity exclusively.
The obvious retort is to point to Arlington Cemetery where there are lots and lots of crosses.
What’s the difference?
According to the court, the memorial in Maryland is too big.
Yep, apparently the First Amendment now hinges on size.
So, should the case get appealed to the Supreme Court, constitutional case law may come down to a question of inches.
Unbelievable.
Here’s more from HotAir…
Stupid, but unfortunately this stupidity is baked into the jurisprudential cake due to the intractability of the underlying problem. It’d be nice to set a bright-line rule about religious symbols on state land, where they’re either always okay or never okay. But neither of those positions works. You can’t have a system where they’re always okay or else you’re inviting overt attempts at religious indoctrination by the government. That would violate the Establishment Clause. At the other extreme, you can’t have a system where religious symbols are never permitted. Imagine trying to remove the crosses at Arlington National Cemetery. Necessarily the analysis in cases about monuments is ad hoc, and just as necessarily that sort of analysis depends on the judge’s subjective view.
Courts are left trying to feel their way case by case, essentially taking a “I know it when I see it” approach to unconstitutional government-financed religious symbolism. Normally that involves applying something called the “Lemon test,” drawn from a SCOTUS case of the same name, which tries to standardize judicial reasoning in analyzing cases like these. But it ends up as a hash in practice, with judges essentially using it to wrestle with the concept of de minimis indoctrination. Every religious symbol on government land risks indoctrinating the observer a little bit. Invariably the symbols are tied to virtues like heroism in war, in law enforcement, and so on. If you admire the valor of a soldier and a giant cross stands before you to commemorate that valor, maybe you’ll admire the cross and what it represents a little bit more too. But how much more? How much indoctrination is too much for the Establishment Clause?
