In 2001, the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of Frank Buono, an ACLU member, atheist and former National Park Service employee living in Oregon. Mr. Buono said the cross offended him when he returned for visits. Congress authorized a transfer of the property to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. The case reached the Supreme Court, which reversed an appellate court's order and kicked it back to the lower court on April 28. Writing for the court majority (and the vast majority of Americans), Justice Kennedy said: "Here, one Latin cross in the desert evokes far more than religion. It evokes thousands of small crosses in foreign fields marking the graves of Americans who fell in battles, battles whose tragedies are compounded if the fallen are forgotten."
Ten days later, someone cut down the cross, which had been covered by a plywood box lest Mr. Buono see it and start melting.
When another cross appeared a few days later, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.'s Justice Department ordered the Park Service to remove it.
Over in Monterey, Calif., someone in September 2009 tore down a 40-year-old cross on Del Monte Beach that commemorated the city's 200th birthday where Spanish explorer Don Gaspar de Portola and Father Juan Crespi landed. City officials voted to allow private funders to replace it, but the ACLU objected. After a year of legal threats, the cross will be rebuilt instead at the Diocese of Monterey's San Carlos Cemetery.
"In truth, it is no defeat for Christianity," the Monterey Herald smirked in a March 2 editorial. "It is a victory for those twin freedoms - freedom of religion and freedom from religion." Right. Dispatching a historic cross to a cemetery is nobody's defeat. Someone should tell the ACLU folks before they pop more champagne.
The paper did admit that the vandal who cut down the cross won "a minor victory." What would a major victory look like? A torched church?
"It is frustrating to realize that some Christians will truly feel that their faith is under attack even though that simply is not the case," the Herald insisted. "It is a defeat for no one and a victory for people who want to be allowed to believe as they wish."
If that editorial writer were to have a colleague of similar ilk reporting on, say, a 16-1 pounding the Dodgers delivered to the San Francisco Giants, we might read: "It is frustrating to realize that some Giants fans will truly feel that their team lost. It is a defeat for no one. They should believe they were all winners."