He can display whatever he wants on his own property. But he wants to put his personal display on public land.
There are private companies that buy or rent roadside land, erect billboards, and collect money from people who want to disseminate a message. This guy wants the government to provide him with a space to disseminate his message, free of charge.
Then, of course, there’s the question of what to do when someone wants to adorn a different stretch of highway median with a sign saying “All hail Satan, praise the Dark Lord.”
It would be interesting to see if there is some kind of historical documentation that might be used in his favor.
Out in western Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Turnpike has a special area along the shoulder of the highway where people can park their cars and use a pedestrian overpass to get to a Catholic church up on a hill overlooking the highway.
This has to rank up there as one of the most unusual features of the U.S. Interstate Highway System.
The whole basis of the suit is that this was a community project, and according to an absolutist—or French—reading of the First/Fourteenth Amendments no government agency is allowed to display any religious symbols. The problem is that this goes against four hundred years of history, dating back to the founding of this nation. This is iconoclasm pure and simple. Something again to the destruction of the Buddha statues by the Taliban.
Furthermore, one can say that his is IS a private right issue, because in effect the commission devolved him his family the right to construct this building. The argument must then be that the commission never did have this right. But surely time limits ought to apply. The nativity scene stood unchallenged by hundreds of thousands of passersby, many, many of them with standing to sue. So why NOW? Because local agencies are used to caving to pressure exerted by well-funded anti-Christian entities. IOW, they don’t care.