Mt. Soledad cross ordered to be taken down

[Mister Agenda]

For Pete's sake! Read the article. It was built with private funds. Even I would oppose taxpayer funding.

Glad to see you have limits on what you'll approve of on government property.

The issue is that of the free exercise of the people's religious beliefs on property owned by the people. The government of the people owns the sidewalk too. Are you going to ban people from wearing religious symbols on the publicly owned streets or in publicly owned buildings too?

People adorning themselves with their religious symbols is a far cry from people adorning our commonly-held property with their religious symbols.

Religious groups have just as much right as any other group to use public property on which displays of conscience are displayed.

Other private groups have no right to access to government property for their advertising, it's at the discretion of the authorities involved, but in practice it is usually not allowed at all. Once a religous group is allowed to use government property for its displays, the part of government involved has much less discretion: it must allow any other display related to religion that meets publically-known neutral qualifications. To do otherwise would be to show favoritism to particular religions. Unless the goal at the outset was to have some sort of garden of displays of multiple religious viewpoints, the sensible thing to do is not allow any.

Go get you secular humanist manifesto, or whatever floats your boat, carve it on a monument and place it next to the cross. Issue solved. Freedom preserved. The alternative is just censorship, plain and simple.

Both alternatives are viable. It is not censorship to not provide a forum for your position on property owned by all the people. It is not our fault that in many situations, the government body involved chooses to take down the display it has rather than allow other points of view. Maybe they didn't want a 40' statue of Buddha on Mt. Soledad. Or, noting that Jewish War Veterans were among the plaintiffs, maybe they didn't want a 40' tall Star of David.