Free Republic

Ninety-nine years ago, Democrat Sen. John Walter Smith of Maryland provided $50 of his own -- not government -- money to help erect a cross in his home state. He was responding to a request from Mrs. Martin Redman, a mother who had lost her son in World War I. To honor him and the 48 other men from Prince George's County who had lost their lives in the war, she had joined the Prince George's Memorial Committee, whose goal was to erect a memorial not far from the Maryland border with the District of Columbia. In a thank-you note,...

Thursday morning, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in American Legion v. American Humanist Association that a 100-year-old World War I memorial cross in Bladensburg, Maryland, doesn’t “establish” religion. That’s the correct result (read my brief for Cato), but the mish-mash of opinions—it took a paragraph to explain which justice was joining which aspect of the decision—leaves Establishment Clause jurisprudence in the muddled state it’s been for decades.That is, much like in the Ten Commandments cases of 2005, the cross here survived largely because it’s really, really old. Justice Samuel Alito, joined in full by Chief Justice John Roberts and...