Tenth Circuit Rules That Cross On Side Of Highway Memorializing Fallen Trooper Is Unconstitutional

The Wall Street Journal Law Blog reports that that "question was at the heart of the latest case on the always thorny issue of church and state. At issue: Whether commemorating fallen Utah highway troopers by erecting crosses on state roads violated First Amendment strictures about government treatment of religion. On Wednesday, a federal appeals court panel said yes, holding that a 'reasonable observer' could conclude that the presence of the crosses amounted to a state-endorsement of Christianity. The decision reversed a 2007 district court ruling, in which the judge wrote that crosses merely sent a secular message about death.

“This may lead the reasonable observer to fear that Christians are likely to receive preferential treatment from the [Utah Highway Patrol],” the judges wrote, adding elsewhere in the opinion that “unlike Christmas, which has been widely embraced as a secular holiday. . . . there is no evidence in this case that the cross has been widely embraced by non-Christians as a secular symbol of death.”

Christmas is a "secular holiday" as a product of twisted Supreme Court precedent that would not allow it to be a federal holiday otherwise. Merely changing the label from religious to secular suffices to remove the "imprimatur or religion" in the eyes of the Court that has to play such ridiculous games to not come out with the most absurd outcome of banning Christmas. Putting aside those of other faiths that do not observe the holiday precisely because normal people realize it has always been the holiday commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ (interesting how that same word appears in "CHRISTmas," must be some secular coincidence), I am sure many religious Christians would find it offensive and patently absurd that the only way the Courts allow Christmas to continue is to pretend the holiday is completely "secular."

The Tenth Circuit states that "the reasonable observer to fear that Christians are likely to receive preferential treatment." Seriously? The reasonable observer will begin shivering in his seat, shaking in his boots, as he drives on a highway because a cross was put up on the side of the road to memorialize a fallen trooper? The reaction of any reasonable person will really be fear of any sort? Reasonable to the Tenth Circuit, an idiotic notion to normal people.

I have come to be not surprised by the judiciary issuing very nonsensical rulings like this, especially in the very muddled and twisted area of Establishment Clause jurisprudence. None of this judicial lunacy has even a slight resemblance to the reason the Establishment Clause was put into the Constitution, it all does nothing more than make a mockery of the judiciary and abuse the Constitution itself. Tweet