Robert Barnes has a story on the cover of Tuesday's Washington Post about a World War I memorial cross on federal land in California's Mojave National Preserve that will give the Superme Court under Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. its first major opportunity to interpret the constitutional separation of church and state.

The piece begins:

It would be easy to miss among the yucca and Joshua trees of this vast place -- a small plywood box, set back from a gentle curve in a lonesome desert road. It looks like nothing so much as a miniature billboard without a message.

But inside the box is a 6 1/2 -foot white cross, built to honor the war dead of World War I. And because its perch on a prominent outcropping of rock is on federal land, it has been judged to be an unconstitutional display of government favoritism of one religion over another.

Barnes goes on to describe what's at stake:

If the court reaches the constitutional issues at hand, all sides agree it could provide clarity to the court's blurry rules on church-and-state separations. It could also carry important implications for the fate of war memorials around the country that feature religious imagery -- the Argonne Cross in Arlington National Cemetery, for instance, or the Memorial Peace Cross in Bladensburg.

Defenders of the cross include veterans groups and the federal government. In an effort to protect it, Congress has designated the site as the country's only official memorial to the nation's World War I dead, which, as Barnes points out, elevates it to an exclusive group of national treasures that inlcudes the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore.

Critics include Jewish and Muslim veterans and the American Civil Liberties Union, which says the congressional action "necessarily will reflect continued government association with the preeminent symbol of Christianity."

Read the story at washingtonpost.com.