Judge Gives San Diego 90 Days to Remove Cross

I grew up in San Diego (kindergarten through 9th grade), and the cross was always there on Mt. Soledad. They built the one that's there now before I was born. But in 1989, some self-centered athiest decided to be offended, and he filed a lawsuit to have it removed. It's been in the courts ever since.

WorldNetDaily reported today that a federal judge has ordered the city of San Diego to remove the cross within 90 days.

U.S. District Judge Gordon Thompson said, "It is now time, and perhaps long overdue, for this court to enforce its initial permanent injunction forbidding the presence of the Mount Soledad cross on city property," the San Diego Union-Tribune reported.

Thompson ruled in 1991 the Mount Soledad cross violates the so-called "separation of church and state" but the case has remained in courts and become an issue of public policy for more than a decade.

Thompson just sounds pissy (pardon my language) about this. He made a ruling in 1991, and nobody paid attention to him. So now he's going to make them "enforce [his] initial permanent injunction."

This isn't a case of people building a cross on top of a hill as a religious statement. It's a war memorial. The location was used as a Memorial Park beginning in 1914, and in 1954 the current 29-foot cross was built as part of a Korean War Memorial (history here).

The battle began in 1989 when Phillip Paulsen, an atheist, filed suit, and a court ordered the city to remove the cross. In 1998, the city sold the property to the Mt. Soledad War Memorial Association, which again was challenged in court. The sale originally was upheld but later ruled unconstitutional by the full panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and remanded back to district court to work out a remedy.

During its brief period of ownership, the Memorial Association made significant improvements, including extensive landscaping and the addition of more than 3,000 plaques honoring military veterans.

With the sale to the Memorial Association nullified by the Left-leaning 9th Circuit Court, San Diego area congressmen got busy.

A bill authorizing the federal government to take over the memorial was authored by Republican U.S. Reps. Duncan Hunter and Randy Cunningham. President Bush signed the bill into law in December.

Proposition A, passed by 75 percent in July, called for the city to donate the cross to the federal government as the centerpiece of a veterans memorial.

The ballot initiative came about after the city refused to donate the cross and memorial to the federal government. A group called San Diegans for the Mount Soledad National War Memorial took just 23 days to gather 105,000 signatures.

The courts, Thompson included, objected to the cross being on city property. But they won't let the city sell it or transfer it. They keep declaring that the city owns the property, and therefore it's a government endorsement of religion, and therefore the cross must come down. They keep going in circles, allowing no recourse, even though San Diego's citizens overwhelmingly want to keep it. It's so frustrating living in a time and place full of leftist-activist courts.

I'll have to take a road trip down to San Diego within the next 90 days, just in case, and see it before it's gone.