In 1934, a small band of veterans of the First World War gathered at Sunrise Rock, an outcropping of stone in the Mojave Desert. There they raised a modest, handmade white, wooden cross, about five-feet high. At the foot of the cross they placed a plaque that read, "The Cross, Erected in Memory of the Dead of All Wars. Erected 1934 by Members of Veterans of Foreign Wars, Death Valley Post 2884."

Many of these men had moved to Death Valley following the Great War on the advice of doctors, who thought the warm, arid climate would help their injuries heal. For the most part, they lived a humble existence: Some took up mining; some built small ranches. John Riley Bembry was typical. Born in 1899, he had been a medic in the war and then dabbled in prospecting, living in a shack made of wood planks and corrugated aluminum seven miles from Sunrise Rock. He was a man of little religious conviction, but he agreed to look after the memorial.

Over the years, the cross sometimes fell prey to vandals. In one such incident, both the plaque and the cross were taken and Bembry replaced the wooden cross with one made of steel pipes. He did not replace the plaque. In 1983, his health failing, Bembry approached a local man he'd befriended, Henry Sandoz, and asked him to assume care of the memorial. Sandoz agreed, and Bembry died a few months later.
Sandoz still looks after the memorial today. But perhaps for not much longer. The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments in Buono v. Salazar, a case in which a retired National Park Service employee, Frank Buono, is demanding that the government--specifically Ken Salazar, the secretary of the Interior--take down the cross.

On the surface, Buono is a relatively straightforward Establishment Clause fight--the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment stipulates that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." The Sunrise Rock cross is, indisputably, a Christian symbol. It sits on land that is part of the Mojave National Preserve, which is operated by the National Park Service. But the particular facts of the case--both the origins of the suit and the course of the litigation--demonstrate how the modern machinery of civil liberties law abets a certain type of antireligious passion.

Sunrise Rock did not always belong to the Park Service. When the Death Valley VFW dedicated its memorial, the land was in the public domain. Which is to say that, after California achieved statehood, all of the unclaimed land was given to the government's General Land Office--the same body that handed out plots to homesteaders in the 1860s. It administered the empty land in the desert, assigning mining claims to prospectors and handing out grazing rights to ranchers. In 1994 the land was transferred out of the public domain and to the National Park Service so it could create the Mojave National Preserve.

At 1.6 million acres, the preserve is one of America's largest national parks. The federal government owns roughly 90 percent of it. The state of California owns 43,000 acres, and 86,000 noncontiguous acres are owned by a thousand private landowners. These plots are dotted indiscriminately throughout the preserve with no markings or signage. To visitors, they're indistinguishable from the rest of the land.

Frank Buono worked at the preserve in the mid-1990s, before retiring in 1997. In 1999, the Park Service received a strange note from "Sherpa San Harold Horpa." Horpa wanted to install a Buddhist shrine close to the Sunrise Rock cross. Perhaps sensing that they were being led into an Establishment Clause trap, the Park Service responded to Horpa with a letter saying that he was not allowed to erect a religious symbol on federal land and that violation of this command could result in "citation and/or arrest." A handwritten aside on the letter informed Horpa that the Park Service knew about the memorial cross near where Horpa wanted his shrine and stated, "It is our intention to have the cross removed."