SCOTUS further maims religious freedom

As I see it, the most horrendous ruling of the just completed Supreme Court term was not its gerrymandering ruling. FAR from it.

Rather, it was in American Legion vs American Humanist Association, where the court essentially agreed to grandmother past constitutional review any public-sector display of a religious artifact on grounds of "civil religion" while essentially refusing to take a look at why it was erected in the first place.

The case involved a cross erected on public land in Bladensburg, Maryland, as part of a World War I cemetery consecration.

Breyer and Kagan think a cross is perfectly OK on public land as long as its connected to a war. (This itself is a problem, the militarization of Merika now creeping into the world of civil liberties.) Part of it with Breyer, per this analysis, is that he was upholding his own previous ruling in Van Orton v Perry, and even if not upholding precedents in general, justices will uphold their own previous rulings through any and every convolution.

By Breyer's Van Orton logic, now doubled down
upon, 10 Commandments monuments like this
all across the country (this in front of a Santa Fe
fire station) get a constitutional pass. This one
caught my eye years ago precisely because being
in Santa Fe, it's nowhere near Red Stateland.

For the unfamiliar, Van Orton v Perry was one of the most godawful "civic religion" rulings the court has made in at least 20 years. It's the one where the court said that the state of Texas could keep the Ten Commandments on state Capitol grounds.

Any unbiased idiot could see that the Eagles chose the Ten Commandments because of all the other God vs Godless communism stuff of the Cold War, and that it was NOT promoting "religion" in the abstract, but Judeo-Christian (usual Judeo fig leaf) ideas in the concrete.

And, he says 40 years passage of time means there was no "intimidation." He ignores the idea that, rather, it meant the intimidation was strong enough nobody publicly protested. In the Bladensburg case, the Jewish War Veterans addresses exactly that issue, plus the one of standing. A representatives of the organization takes a pass on calling out Breyer and Kagan as Jewish, though.

Those two, along with Roberts and Kavanaugh, by only partially concurring with Alito's main opinion, may — or may not — try to control how broad its provenance is. Gorsuch, after all, rejected Breyer's "historical patina" ideas and said new displays should be judged just like old ones.

Per that link, I believe that the core majority did a reverse Lemon test ruling.

Michael Stokes Paulsen, also at Scotusblog, thinks or claims there was a unified core to the ruling, and an insightful one. Of course he would, being a member of the Federalist Society. (Scotusblog could identify guest posters on site rather than making me Google, when they don't explicitly state their backgrounds.)

A representative of the Baptist Joint Commission on Religious Liberty totally refudiates Paulsen while accepting the fractured decision as the least bad option.