-By Warner Todd Huston
It’s about time one of these baseless, nuisance lawsuits against some decades-old display of the Christian faith was given the heave-ho out of court, as all of them should. And that is just what happened to a lawsuit demanding the removal of a cross memorial to the fallen of WWI that was erected nearly 100 years ago.
In a judge’s decision on Monday, Maryland federal judge Deborah Chasanow threw out a lawsuit that was demanding the removal of a cross monument standing in mute tribute to The Great War that was erected at the intersection of State Route 450 and U.S. Route 1 in Bladensburg, Maryland. The display was built by members of the American Legion in 1925.
The monument is part of a park built to Maryland veterans and also contains memorials to soldiers who died in WWII, Pearl Harbor, the Korean War, Vietnam and other wars and battles.
The lawsuit was filed by liberals who claimed to be “offended” by the Latin Cross shape of the WWI memorial. They also claimed that since it was on government property it amounted to some sort of violation of the U.S. Constitution and its purported “separation of church and state” clause–which, of course, doesn’t even exist.
Strangely, along with their utterly false claims that the memorial constituted a government approved display of a Christian symbol, the lefties that filed this nuisance lawsuit also claimed that religious services were a part of the memorial and even that the KKK was an integral part of the monument. Both claims were patently false as the judge ruled.
As Hans Von Spakovsky explained:
According to the judge, although the “Latin cross is undeniably a religious symbol,” the courts have recognized that “displaying a cross to honor fallen soldiers is a legitimately secular purpose, and does not always promote a religious message.” In fact, “in the period immediately following World War I, [building a cross] could also be motivated by the ‘the sea of crosses’ marking graves of American servicemen who died overseas.” The Bladensburg Cross “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.”
The Commission is driven by a secular purpose: “maintaining and displaying a ‘historically significant war memorial’ that has honored fallen soldiers for almost a century.” Nothing in the record showed that the Commission’s work “is driven by a religious purpose whatsoever.” The record showed that even “the purpose of the private citizens who were behind the Monument’s construction 90 years ago was a predominantly secular one.”
In the end, the judge ruled that no reasonable person could ever conclude that the stone memorial was meant as some stealth imposition of the Christian religion on the people of Maryland.
This is a proper outcome and it should be celebrated. It should also serve as a model for all such nuisance lawsuits.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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