(di Matthew T. Hall. Fonte: San Diego Union Tribune)
The Mount Soledad cross must go, the San Diego City Council said Tuesday. The 16-year saga of whether the cross would stay on public land in La Jolla came to an emotional conclusion Tuesday night as the council voted 5-3 to reject a last-ditch effort to keep it in place. The vote capped a six-hour public hearing that attracted 350 people, most of them Christians who urged the council to donate the cross and surrounding land to the federal government so it possibly could remain where it has stood since 1954. But the cross will be moved to comply with an injunction forbidding its presence on public land. Federal Judge Gordon Thompson Jr. issued the injunction in 1991, when he ruled the cross violated the state Constitution’s guarantee of separation between church and state. Thompson had left it to the city and the lawyers in the case to resolve the matter. In the latest legal decision in the case, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2002 that the constitutional violation still existed when it struck down the city’s second attempt to sell the land to a private buyer. “This is definitely the first page of the final chapter, and I don’t expect the final chapter to last another five years,” lawyer James McElroy said Tuesday night. “I think we are at the end of the line here.” McElroy represents Philip Paulson, one of two atheists who filed the original lawsuit against the city in 1989. […] William Kellogg, president of the Mount Soledad Memorial Association, which built and maintains the cross, said placing the group under the National Park Service would subject it to cumbersome levels of bureaucracy and jeopardize plans for a veterans memorial on the hill. The association began building its memorial in 2000. It is a collection of walls and plaques designed to honor veterans of all wars, and Kellogg said fund raising and plaque purchases have suffered in recent years because of the uncertainty caused by the legal challenges to the cross. “Moving the cross to private land will save the cross and will allow the association to become the owners of the land and will allow the association to operate the memorial walls and honor veterans for posterity,” Kellogg said.