Small white cross in Mojave National preserve is at center of major legal dispute

By James Rufus Koren
Redlands Daily Facts







Easter morning service at the Mojave Cross in 2003. (Eric Reed Photographer)



A small memorial in a remote part of San Bernardino County is at the center of a nearly decade-long legal battle that will culminate next month when the Supreme Court will hear arguments for and against removing a white cross from federal land in the Mojave National preserve.

In advance of the Supreme Court taking up the case, a group of six soldiers drove from Fort Polk, La., to the memorial, gathering signatures on a support petition along the way. They arrived at the memorial Thursday, where they were met by more than 100 supporters.

The memorial is a white cross, about 8 feet tall, along Cima Road in the Mojave National Preserve, closer to the Nevada border than to Barstow. For the past few years, the cross has been covered with a wooden box.

The Liberty Legal Institute, a Texas-based group that represents several veterans groups and supports keeping the cross in place, describes it as a veterans memorial "in the shape of a cross."

In a legal brief submitted to the Supreme Court, Liberty Legal says it will argue "the Mojave Desert Veterans Memorial does not violate the Establishment Clause, and never did."

The brief notes that many public military memorials and cemeteries are home to crosses or religious imagery and that a ruling against the Mojave monument could endanger other monuments.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, which has been fighting to have the cross removed for nearly 10 years, says this is a clear-cut case of the federal government endorsing a religious display.
The Southern California ACLU announced in October 2000 that the National Park Service planned to take the cross down "within the next few months."

The cross was never removed because Congress voted to prevent federal funding to be used for removing it. That decision drew a lawsuit from the ACLU.

In 2002, a federal district court ruled in the ACLU's favor, saying the cross being displayed on public lands violated the constitutionally mandated separation of church and state. Two years later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with that ruling.

In 2002, a clause in the Department of Defense budget called for transferring the land beneath the cross to a local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. But the district court again sided with the ACLU.

"It is evident to the court that the government has engaged in herculean efforts to preserve the Latin cross on federal land and that the proposed transfer of the subject property can only be viewed as an attempt to keep the Latin cross atop Sunrise Rock without actually curing the continuing Establishment Clause violation by Defendants," Judge Robert Timlin wrote in the court's ruling.

The Ninth Circuit agreed once again.

The Supreme Court will take up the case in October.