Controversy Over L.A. County Seal Cross Continues
by Jim Brown
June 10, 2004
(AgapePress) - A public interest law firm has filed suit in Federal District Court in California to block Los Angeles County from removing a small cross from its official seal. Officials decided last week to replace the cross with another image after the American Civil Liberties Union threatened the city with a law suit.The Thomas More Law Center has filed suit on behalf of Ernesto Vasquez, a Los Angeles County employee who objects to the removal of the cross from the state seal, as demanded by the ACLU. The suit brought by Vasquez contends that removal of the cross would send a government-sponsored message of hostility towards Christians and would be in violation the United States Constitution.
Charles Limandri, director of Thomas More's west coast regional office, explains. "Not only can the government not establish and promote a particular religion," but the government is not supposed to be in the business of discriminating against or showing hostility towards any particular religion because in doing that, it's really favoring the others. We feel that's what's going on here."
The law center spokesman says county officials should never have let a threatened lawsuit from the ACLU intimidate them into complying with their demand, which claims the cross violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution. He feels this is simply a case of a government entity once again caving in to a threat from the ACLU, which wants to antagonize Christians wherever it can.
And Limandri says the very idea that a small cross somehow endorses religion is laughable. "The cross is the least obvious in terms of standing out ... compared to all the other symbols," he says. "It's one of the very smallest on the emblem, and to single that out, saying that somehow constitutes establishment of the Christian religion is really kind of ridiculous."
Recently the Roman Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles added his voice to those opposing the removal of the religious symbol. According to an Associated Press report, Cardinal Roger Mahony has asked the county supervisors to reconsider their decision. The archbishop says the cross on the seal reflects the importance of Catholic missions in Los Angeles County's early history, and to remove it, he insists, would be to deny the historical record.
Desert cross decision upheld
Meanwhile, in a similar case elsewhere in California, a federal appeals court has ruled that an eight-foot cross in the Mohave National Preserve that was intended to be a war memorial is an unconstitutional endorsement of religion. In that case, AP reports, the ACLU sued on behalf of a retired National Park Service employee who objected to the religious symbolism of the steel-pipe structure.
The cross, built in 1934 by World War One veterans on a site known as Sunrise Rock, has been covered with a tarpaulin ever since 2002, when a federal judge sided with the ACLU and ruled that the "primary effect of the presence of the cross" was to "advance religion." That decision has now been upheld by a San Francisco federal appeals court.
