The Supreme Court agrees to hear the dispute over a giant cross

WASHINGTON – The US Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would fight for an imposing cross in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, a case that invites the court to more specifically define the type of protest that the government approves.

The court 's rulings have been notoriously erratic in this area and Judge Brett Kavanaugh' s views are unlikely to be very different from those of Anthony Kennedy, who was willing to tolerate a lower separation wall between l & # 39; church and the state.

The case involves the challenge of a concrete cross 20 meters high at a busy intersection of Bladensburg, Maryland. Completed in 1925, it was built to commemorate 49 deceased county soldiers during the First World War.

In 2012, the American Humanist Association filed a lawsuit, claiming that its presence on public lands violated the Constitution, amounting to a religious institution by the government. The Court of Appeals of the Fourth Circuit in Virginia agreed, claiming that she could not ignore that "for thousands of years, the Latin cross stands for Christianity".

Because the government owns the land on which the cross rests and has spent public funds to maintain the memorial, the government is unduly entangled in a particular religion, said the court of appeal. A reasonable observer would conclude that the government "places Christianity above other religions, with the American and Christian viewpoints being the same, or both."

In defending the cross, the American Legion claims that the memorial was designed to reflect cross-shaped marks on the graves of US soldiers abroad. According to the group, in the aftermath of the First World War, crosses became the cultural symbol of the dead. The government "can therefore use a cross to commemorate a secular historical event".

A Supreme Court ruling upholding the lower court's decision against the cross would cast doubt on hundreds of similar monuments across the country that use crosses to commemorate lives lost in war, warns the US Legion.

The case will be debated early next year.

Pete Williams

Pete Williams is a NBC News correspondent covering the Justice Department and the Supreme Court, based in Washington.