Transcript of Oral Argument in Salazar v. Buono

It's here.  A backgrounder on the case is here.  More on oral argument later.

Comments

[Charles]

I don't think that Mojave cross has a snowball's chance in Hades of staying up.

First Amendment aside, the current cross was erected illegally in 1998. Private individuals erected it without asking National Park Service (NPS) permission and without receiving an NPS permit to install it. To the best of my knowledge, it is illegal to build or erect any sort of monument of substantial structure on federal property without official goverment permission. If we were to erect a habitat for humanity house overnight at the base of the Washington Monument, I guarantee the bulldozer would be out there tearing it down tomorrow morning. So, on that basis alone, I don't even know why we are having this judicial conversation about the Mojave cross.

[Joe]

If this is so, why is it up there now? Allowing it while rejecting the installation of a Buddhist display is patent religious favoritism.

The SC seems to want this case to go away. Not allowing challenges in most cases would promote the type of religious favoritism that appears to this outside observer to be going on here.

Also, at first, I thought this was the case Peter Irons discusses in his book "God On Trial." But, that involves a different, and much larger, cross.

[Joe]

Let me add to my last comment -- the Pew Forum article helps me out here.

The Park Service according to that article was going to remove the cross, but then the defenders of the faith (sarcasm off) known as the US Congress decided to step in and disallow use of federal funds to do it.

IOW, without Congress' religious entanglement / favoritism, this whole thing might not have happened. This underlines the problem.

[Bob Ritter]

Charles, have you seen the rock the cross is on? Doubt that a bulldozer would climb it! But welder's torch would do the trick (or a ratchet if it's bolted to the rock).

I was at the oral arguments. Justice Scalia lost his cool (tho I would never describe him as "cool") when Peter Eliasberg told him that you would never see a Christian cross in a Jewish cemetery (in rebuttal to Scalia calling the Christian cross a universal symbol of death and remembrance). Scalia embarrassed the Court.