Supreme Court Will Hear Case on Veterans’ Cross Memorial Atheists Oppose

The Supreme Court recently announced that it will hear an appeal for a case involving a memorial cross. This large cross stands in an open field in Bladensburg, Maryland, and commemorates the sacrifice of 49 local servicemen who gave their lives in World War I. We talk with Jeremy Dys of First Liberty, the organization that is defending the memorial against the American Humanist Association.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Jeremy Dys is the deputy general counsel for First Liberty, a law firm that defends religious freedom for all Americans, and is representing the American Legion in this veterans’ cross case.

Daniel Davis: Last year my colleague Jarrett and I went out to Bladensburg, Maryland, to see the memorial cross that your organization is now defending in court. And when we got there we saw a list of names on the monument, men who had given their lives in World War I, and it was sobering because we knew that if the court rules a certain way, it could soon be gone.

Can you give us some background here? Why is this memorial cross under threat?

Jeremy Dys: Well, a couple years ago the American Humanist Association decided that, for the first time in the 90-plus-year history of this memorial, it is violating the Constitution because it appears on public property. And the reason they say that it is violating the Constitution is that it is in the shape of a Celtic cross.

In fact, the Gold Star mothers who designed this memorial back in 1919, a hundred years ago now, they chose the shape that mimicked the markers that sat over the top of the graves of many of their sons over in Europe. Most of the men who died in World War I were buried under a Celtic cross. Teddy Roosevelt’s son, for instance, famously was buried under a Celtic cross in the European battlefields.

And so they knew that Americans would forget the sacrifice of their sons if they didn’t have something to visually remind them of that. So they decided to design this monument in the design of a Celtic cross. And then they built it.

The American Legion jumped in to help out, and by 1925 that monument was erected right there, right at the terminus of the National Defense Highway, which is itself a World War I memorial. It runs between D.C. and Annapolis, Maryland.

And it’s been standing there, perfectly innocently keeping watch over the memory of these 49 men from Prince George’s County, Maryland, just as their mothers had wanted nearly a hundred years now until the Humanist Association decided that they’d had enough, and that that could no longer be tolerated. And so they managed to get the 4th Circuit to agree and now we’re at the Supreme Court of the United States.

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