Court: CA Cross Unconstitutional

This doesn’t make things any less murky. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a 43-foot cross on San Diego’s Mt. Soledad—public property—unconstitutional, but they stopped short of having it removed completely. Instead, they sent it back to a federal trial judge for “further proceedings” on the issue of whether the cross can “pass constitutional muster” as a war memorial. The Jewish War Veterans and other litigants, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union, had sued to have the cross removed following a 2008 ruling by a federal judge that the cross is part of a war memorial and could remain. The U.S. Department of Defense bought the property surrounding the cross in 2006, a move that supporters hoped would protect the cross from the impending lawsuits first filed in the 1990s.