The nation's largest veterans' service organization is teaming up with two Christian legal groups in an effort aimed at protecting Christian-themed war memorials from lawsuits that would remove them from public property.
The American Legion is asking its members to contribute to a catalog of war memorials that feature crosses and other religious symbols. The group will monitor its database of memorials and will notify the Alliance Defense Fund and the Liberty Legal Institute of any attempts by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and similar groups to challenge their constitutionality.
The effort stems from recent attempts by the ACLU to have crosses removed from memorials in Mt. Soledad, Calif., and in the Mojave Desert.
As Cybercast News Service previously reported, President Bush in 2006 signed a law transferring ownership of the land from San Diego to the federal government. The ACLU challenged the voter-approved land transfer, but in December 2006, the California Court of Appeals
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals instructed the Department of the Interior to dismantle the cross, which at the time was located on land owned by the federal government.
Congress in 2004 authorized the sale of the land to private parties in an effort to save the cross, prompting the ACLU to file a lawsuit challenging the land transfer deal. A federal district court judge ruled in 2005 that the transfer was invalid and ordered that it be removed.
The cross is currently covered with boards, making it resemble a box on a stick rather than a cross. Meanwhile, Christian legal groups like ADF are appealing the 2005 decision.
"Stamping out these symbols of sacrifice is the first step to forgetting who's kept America free and what's made America great," ADF Senior Counsel and Vice President Joe Infranco said in a statement announcing the project.
"ADF, the American Legion and Liberty Legal are joining together to ensure that we will never forget the sacrifice made by so many for our precious freedoms," he said, "including the freedom to honor our fallen heroes as we choose."
Infranco said crosses on veteran's memorials "are under attack" and that "Americans want these memorials to be protected."
According to one anti-religion activist group involved in the campaign against crosses on memorials, many of the monuments are probably safe until their lawsuits start working and it becomes clear the Supreme Court would uphold their removal.
"I would not jump into the fray until we see what happens with these other cases [Mt. Soledad and Mojave Desert]," Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said, adding that "the ACLU might feel the same way: Let's wait and see."
A spokesman for the ACLU did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
"There isn't a way to address all of them," Gaylor told Cybercast News Service. "You have to take these violations one case at a time, and we are facing a very hostile Supreme Court.
"If it wasn't the current court, I would have no concern that this could possibly be upheld," she said, "but with this new court, we don't know how they're behaving, but they seem to be behaving very badly on separation of church and state."
Gaylor called the land-transfer attempts to protect the two crosses "despicable" and criticized Congress for getting involved in local cases.
"They have gone out of their way in Congress getting into the act. It's just been a very sobering education about the lack of understanding of separation of church and state and the willingness to be manipulative and to try to subvert the First Amendment."
She said war memorials that feature religious symbols are offensive and unconstitutional because "it isn't the business of our secular government to have any opinion ... on religion, much less plant crosses on the highest point in any city and put it as part of a government park."
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