Justice Kennedy, You Fucked Up

SCOTUS today issued its long-awaited decision on the controversial Mojave Desert Cross.

That cross, as you will recall, was erected on public land back in the 1930s as a putative "war memorial" -- but since other religions were banned from erecting symbols of their belief along with the cross, it was nothing more than government sponsorship of Christianity.

I've commented before on this particular piece of crap. And now, with today's 5-4 split decision, the high court says that it's just fine to have it there.

Predictably the Four Fascists (Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts) were in the majority, joined by sometime swing vote Kennedy:

"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," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote.
In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens agreed that soldiers who died in battle deserve a memorial to their service. But the government "cannot lawfully do so by continued endorsement of a starkly sectarian message," Stevens said.
. . .
Kennedy, who usually is in the court's center on church-state issues, suggested there may have been no problem in the first place.
"The goal of avoiding governmental endorsement does not require eradication of all religious symbols in the public realm," Kennedy said.

Note to Kennedy: Nobody ever said it did, asshole. And evocative as it may be of all those crosses in military cemeteries, if you look closely you'll see that those crosses are joined by stars of David and other symbols of religion, and they all denote the religious beliefs of the former inhabitants of the bodies buried beneath them.

I'm glad to see that Sotomayor came down on the right side of this issue.

And this is one more reason why we'll miss John Paul Stevens.