Nativity Scenes are still against the law in New York City, while the Menorah and Islamic crescent are legal

Appeals court upholds city policy on public holiday displays : AP

A federal appeals court has upheld a city policy on holiday displays for its schools that allows Santa Claus, reindeers, Christmas trees and symbols of Jewish and Islamic holidays but prohibits nativity scenes...

In a dissent, Judge Chester Straub said the policy promotes a year-end holiday celebration which "utilizes religious symbols of certain religions, but bans the religious symbols of another."

This should have been a no-brainer: either all religious symbols or none. Of course the petition was to include all religious symbols. More from the article...

[Petitioner Andrea Skoros] said in her lawsuit that the policy promoted and endorsed the religions of Judaism and Islam and conveyed a message of disapproval toward Christianity.

The appeals court noted that Skoros was not trying to stop the display of the menorah and star and crescent but rather wanted to force the schools to allow nativity scenes.

Robert Muise, an Ann Arbor, Mich.-based lawyer who argued the case for Skoros, said he will ask the full 2nd Circuit to hear the case. If that fails, he said, he'll appeal it to the Supreme Court.

Muise said the new Supreme Court justices were "just waiting for cases like this to come before them to hopefully straighten out the mess the courts have created."