In an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Eugene Kontorovich, an associate professor at Northwestern University School of Law, criticizes the Supreme Court for not yet having established clear guidelines on what he calls “picayune” cases of religious memorials in public spaces — a situation that has led to a series of such cases in the last decade (“…the ACLU and other plaintiffs have scoured public spaces for religious symbols to challenge under the First Amendment”).  To make his point, Kontorovich compares Salazar v. Buono, a pending Supreme Court case that challenges the constitutionality of an eight foot cross (Kontorovich prefers “cruciform”) that was erected in a World War I memorial park in the Mojave desert in 1934, to the unchallenged charter for a national cathedral.  Congress, in 1893, established the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation to build a church on private property with private funds.  It was finally dedicated by George H. W. Bush in 1990. If we’re fine with a national cathedral — and not a national synagogue, say — what’s the matter with a cross in the desert that was erected in the 1930s?  The ACLU has, in lower courts, successfully argued that the Mojave cross positions the government as honoring only Christian soldiers and not those of other beliefs.  Kontorovich counters by quoting Henry Satterlee, the National Cathedral’s first bishop:

“Religious and patriotic associations have [always] been intertwined,” Satterlee wrote, and thus some public religious forum is needed to give full scope to peoples’ national feeling. (Consider the national motto, or the Pledge of Allegiance.) The Cathedral’s charter suggests Congress agreed.