The National Park Service continues to avoid setting policy on religious displays in public parks, according to a watchdog alliance of public employees.
The nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility said Thursday that the Park Service has acted as if it were in a “a stupor over the stupa,” a 9-foot Buddhist structure for worship and storage of relics located at Petroglyph National Monument near Albuquerque.
PEER, an association of local, state and federal scientists, law officers and land managers, said the Park Service has failed to review the appropriateness of keeping the stupa — on private property acquired in 1996 for the monument — and religious markers in other parks.
Park Service Intermountain Region spokesman James Doyle said matters have been referred to an Interior Department solicitor.
“We are dealing with this,” Doyle said, “but dealing with religious displays is not easy. We want to be respectful of the separation of church and state, but it’s sometimes difficult to tell the history of the U.S. without preserving the role religion has played.”
For example, Doyle said, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta is an integral part of a National Historic Site in the NPS system. And Yosemite National Park is home to a historic chapel.
Bronze plaques bearing Bible verse, donated in the 1960s by a Protestant religious order called the Evangelical Sisterhood of Mary, were removed from Grand Canyon National Park on the advice of lawyers July 14, 2003. Four days later, the Park Service’s then-deputy director, Donald Murphy, wrote to the sisters and asked them to return the plaques to their original locations.
The Bible verses are from Psalms, including: “O Lord, how manifold are thy works! In wisdom thou hast made them all: the earth is full of thy riches.”
Murphy said then that the Park Service would undertake more in-depth legal and policy review.
“When it comes to religious displays, Park Service leadership reacts like a deer in the headlights — afraid to move but frozen in an indefensible position,” said PEER executive director Jeff Ruch.
“PEER has no hostility toward religion, but we are concerned about the appropriate use of federal lands in the national park system,” Ruch said. “What will it take to get National Park Service officials to respect the U.S. Constitution?”
Local Buddhists have asked the Park Service and New Mexico’s congressional delegation to preserve the stupa, consecrated in 1989.
The land that it’s on had been owned by Ariane Emery and her husband, Dr. Harold Cohen. Their house and all other structures, except the stupa, were removed when the Park Service bought the land.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
