The legal principle cui bono? matters because it clears the air: Who benefits? Yet American jurisprudence doesn’t hold the opposite question in the same regard: Cui patitur? Who suffers?
The Will I’d known in school engaged life like a bookish Scaramouche, with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. I didn’t know this side of him. Maybe it came from Marsha, who was deeply religious. It might always have been there. Thank God for faith! I thought.
On May 8 of last year the three members of the Boone County Commission received a letter from Americans United for Separation of Church and State in Washington DC. Someone had dropped a dime on the Desert Storm memorial (an e-mail, actually) and now Americans United wanted to know more. They asked the county for any documents explaining how it was proposed, approved, and installed, and in particular “all documents discussing the components or emblems of the monument, such as the ichthys.” If remarks were made at the dedication back in ’92, Americans United wanted to know what they were. The organization gave the county three business days to comply.
This Memorial Day, the question festering, the Connors wrote to Boone County. The ichthys is a “simple symbol” of the dead servicemen’s “source of strength,” they insisted, pointing out that many and various ceremonies had been held on the courthouse grounds since the memorial was mounted and no one had ever objected. “Shouldn’t the actions of Boone Countians across more than two decades hold more weight than the complaints of a group with no affiliation to the County?”
And on August 11, in what I would like to think was a far more wrenching decision, the commission voted unanimously to uproot the Desert Storm memorial and transfer it to a local cemetery. One commissioner said he relied on Simon’s analysis to make the “financially prudent” choice, and the county counselor called it the “right risk-management decision.”
Who suffers? Two families lost their sons in a war that by the standards of our other wars in the Middle East was over in a blink of an eye and was almost bloodless. (There were fewer than 150 American combat deaths in the Gulf War.) But they saw to it their sons’ names were kept alive on a stone in a public space, alongside other stones honoring the dead of other wars. That wasn’t a lot of compensation. But it was something. Now they must trust the county that beat a fast retreat to come up with something equivalent—though minus any expression of the faith that held the families up when they got the news.
