As a sitting Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens was attentive to the symbolic meaning of things. As recently as April, in the “cross in the desert” case Salazar v. Buono, Stevens wrote, “Making a plain, unadorned Latin cross a war memorial does not make the cross secular. It makes the war memorial sectarian.”

On Thursday the now-retired justice delivered a speech reflecting on the symbolism of another war memorial   ( Stevens was speaking before the National Japanese American Memorial Foundation, a memorial to the contribution of Japanese-Americans to the war effort and to the relocation and detainment of Japanese Americans during WWII ) and on the recent controversy over building an Islamic cultural center that includes a mosque near ground zero in New York City.

Click here to read the full statement.

“Guilt by association is unfair,” Stevens concluded. “The monument teaches us that it is profoundly unwise to draw inferences based on a person’s membership in any association or group without first learning something about the group. Its message is a powerful reminder of the fact that ignorance — that is to say, fear of the unknown — is the source of most invidious prejudice.”