U.S. Supreme Court Ignores Appeal On Crosses For Fallen Police

The AP reports that "[t]he Supreme Court won't hear an appeal of a ruling that 12-foot-high crosses along Utah highways in honor of dead state troopers violate the Constitution. The justices voted 8-1 Monday to reject an appeal from Utah and a state troopers' group that wanted the court to throw out the ruling and take a more permissive view of religious symbols on public land. Since 1998, the private Utah Highway Patrol Association has paid for and erected more than a dozen memorial crosses, most of them on state land. Texas-based American Atheists Inc. and three of its Utah members sued the state in 2005. The federal appeals court in Denver said the crosses were an unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity by the Utah state government. Justice Clarence Thomas issued a 19-page opinion dissenting from Monday's order. Thomas said the case offered the court the opportunity to clear up confusion over its approach to disputes over the First Amendment's Establishment Clause, the prohibition against governmental endorsement of religion."

Justice Thomas wrote in his dissent to the Supreme Court's denying certiorari in the highway memorial crosses case of Utah Highway Patrol Association v. American Atheists on October 31, 2011:

"[T]he [Supreme] Court rejects an opportunity to provide clarity to an Establishment Clause jurisprudence in shambles... Because our jurisprudence has confounded the lower courts and rendered the constitutionality of displays of religious imagery on government property anyone’s guess, I would grant certiorari... Even if the Court does not share my view that the Establishment Clause restrains only the Federal Government, and that, even if incorporated, the Clause only prohibits ‘actual legal coercion,’ the Court should be deeply troubled by what its Establishment Clause jurisprudence has wrought... [T]his Cour[t]...[has failed] to apply the correct standard — or at least a clear, workable standard — for adjudicating challenges to government action under the Establishment Clause. Government officials, not to mention everyday people who wish to celebrate or commemorate an occasion with a public display that contains religious elements, cannot afford to guess whether a federal court, applying our 'jurisprudence of minutiae,' (KENNEDY, J.), will conclude that a given display is sufficiently secular."

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