By Staff
BATON ROUGE, La. (LBM) – Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry praised the U.S. Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling, June 20, that protects from destruction a nearly 100-year-old white cross in Maryland that serves as a memorial to fallen soldiers.
“As a veteran, I stand with millions of others in eternal gratitude and respect for our departed’s military service,” Landry shared with the Baptist Message. “Forcing Maryland to remove this veterans’ memorial would have dishonored their sacrifice and created the very divisiveness and hostility toward religion that the Establishment Clause seeks to avoid.”
He was part of a group of 28 state attorneys general who joined a lawsuit to aid the American Legion against the effort of the atheistic American Humanist Association to force the dismantling of a 32-foot Latin cross erected in 1925 to honor 49 soldiers of Prince George’s County, Maryland, killed in World War I.
Justice Samuel Alito wrote an extensive majority opinion, declaring that the war memorial did not violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution in part because it “carries special significance in commemorating World War I.”
Citing the “image of the simple wooden crosses that originally marked the graves of American soldiers killed in the war,” Alito said that “the design of the Bladensburg Cross must be understood in light of that background.”
Landry said he was grateful the Supreme Court recognized in the opinion that “‘destroying or defacing the Cross that has stood undisturbed for nearly a century would not be neutral and would not further the ideals of respect and tolerance embodied in the First Amendment.’”
“I am excited this memorial, and hopefully others like it, will continue to honor American heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for our Nation,” he said.
The complete Supreme Court ruling in American Legion v. American Humanist Association can be read at https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/18pdf/17-1717_4f14.pdf.
A copy of the brief joined by Louisiana and 27 other states can be viewed at https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/17/17-1717/55791/20180727163146000_M0294970.PDF.
