Posted on 07/03/2006 2:40:58 PM PDT by TheDon
It will very likely be in the first line of any account of the four-decade-long career of federal Judge Gordon Thompson Jr.: “The judge who in 1991 ordered that the Mount Soledad cross had to be moved.”
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All of this was triggered by Thompson's Dec. 3, 1991, ruling. In that 40-page opinion, Thompson methodically described the history of the crosses, how the cases came to be and laid out the law he was bound to follow.
In the end, he wrote that that “binding constitutional precedent compels” a finding that the crosses on public land are unconstitutional.
The decision rests on a clause in the state constitution guaranteeing free exercise of religion “without discrimination or preference.”
Thompson cited cases in both state and federal appeals courts on the meaning of the clause. Taken together, they lead to the conclusion that under state law, “a government body is conducting itself unconstitutionally whenever it so much as appears to be preferring one religion over another.”
The cross at the war memorial on city land is a “powerful sectarian symbol,” Thompson wrote, and the city's efforts to describe it as a war memorial are nothing but a “pretext” to obscure its historic purpose and significance.
The decision was immediately criticized – then-county Supervisor George Bailey called it “asinine”
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(Excerpt) Read more at signonsandiego.com ...
This guy got it right!
The judge in this case is clearly a ghoul.
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