The Battle of Mount Soledad
The ACLU won’t stop until a San Diego war memorial is razed.
Atop San Diego’s Mount Soledad—an 822-foot hill overlooking the seaside village of La Jolla—sits a 29-foot concrete cross. Erected in 1954 to commemorate Korean War veterans, the cross is part of a 170-acre, city-owned park offering breathtaking views of the Pacific coastline. For 35 years, it sat unmolested. Then, in 1989, an atheist named Philip Paulson, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, filed a federal lawsuit alleging that the display of a cross on public land was an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Paulson died in 2006, but the litigation he began continues to this day.
The Mount Soledad case is a microcosm of the American culture war, with lawsuits used as weapons, federal courts serving as the battleground, and activist judges allying with the ACLU. The secular left has long sought to purge religious symbols and imagery from the public square, and the Mount Soledad cross was an inevitable target on a list that included nativity scenes, Ten Commandment displays, and religious invocations at public meetings.
In 1991, a federal district court judge ruled in favor of the ACLU’s claim that the presence of a privately funded cross on public property violated the California constitution’s establishment clause. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rubber-stamped the district court’s decision in 1993. The city of San Diego faced a dilemma. The U.S. Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over disputes involving state law, and the California Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction over federal court litigation. The liberal Ninth Circuit was the final word, with no further appellate review. As is typical in “civil rights” cases, the ACLU won substantial attorneys’ fees, thus creating a cottage industry and ensuring that the ACLU’s “pro bono” litigation would continue as long as the cross remained in place.
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