We have long thought the Supreme Court gets the last word.

Not quite.  The Washington Times reports:

Two weeks after the Supreme Court said it could stay, the Mojave Cross war memorial has been ripped out of and stolen from its rocky embankment in the California desert.

Thieves sawed through the welded bolts securing the 8-foot pipe-and-concrete cross to its platform atop Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve late Sunday or early Monday. Park employees discovered the cross missing Monday morning, said Linda Slater, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service.

Authorities have made no arrests in the case, but attorneys who spent years fighting to keep the memorial within the national preserve say they think the culprits were motivated by the Supreme Court's April 28 decision, which allowed the cross to remain for now within the federal preserve.

The Mojave Cross case was not a criminal matter and therefore not the subject of this blog, when it was decided or now.  But theft is a subject of this blog, and so is the rule of law.

It doesn't matter if you think dope should be legal, as some sensible people do.  It isn't, so you can't smoke it.  It doesn't matter if you think abortions should be outlawed, as many people of conscience do.  They're legal, so you can't bomb the abortion clinic.  It doesn't matter if you think the death penalty is wrong.  It's part of the law, so you can't stop it by trying to intimidate physicians who help its administration. 

We have a social contract that calls on us to abide by the law until and unless we change it by persuading a majority of our fellow citizens to do so.  This is highly unsatisfactory to those of us, like me, who think, for example, that our present national legislature is nuts.  But the alternative is a return to the law of the jungle. 

Those who stole the Mojave Cross should be dealt a severe punishment.  It shouldn't have anything to do with religion.  It should have a lot to do with the wrongfulness of thievery, and even more to do with respect for the rule of law.