Successful Petition Drive Would Put Cross Back on L.A. County Seal
by Allie Martin and Jody Brown
September 27, 2004
(AgapePress) - The battle to keep a cross on the Los Angeles County seal is still being waged.Last week, by a 3-2 vote -- and in an effort to avoid a threatened lawsuit -- L.A. County supervisors voted to remove a small cross from the official county seal. The threat of the lawsuit came from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which stated it was offended by the inclusion of a religious symbol in a government emblem and demanded the seal be redesigned, omitting the cross.
Now the Thomas More Law Center is mounting a petition drive to reinstate the original seal. Richard Thompson, who is with the Michigan-based legal group, says a majority of the L.A. County supervisors acted like puppets of the ACLU.
"We said that by removing the cross from the seal, they were showing a hostility towards Christians and Christian symbols and the history of Los Angeles County, which has a lot to do with the [Catholic] missions that were there for centuries."
As Thompson explains, a petition drive is under way to reverse that vote. If successful, the citizens' movement would change the law in the county to allow the cross to remain on the seal and to take away the power of the County Board of Supervisors from changing the seal. "They will put the power in the voters of the county to amend the seal if they ever choose to do that," he says.
The Law Center, which had filed an application for a restraining order against the change, maintains the supervisors knew the pending petition drive had overwhelming public support. Consequently, they hastened their vote on the new seal, hoping to "sabotage the petition drive and thwart the will of the people," the Center states.
Robert Muise of the Law Center finds the supervisors' actions indicative of a bias against Christians. "It is remarkable that county officials would be so willing to waste taxpayer money and needlessly expend municipal resources to push ahead with this new seal while this litigation [the restraining order] is pending," he says. "This just further highlights the lengths they will go to advance their anti-Christian agenda."
Those who support the original county seal have until March 1, 2005, to collect 341,000 valid signatures to force the board of supervisors to adopt an ordinance which would require that the original seal with the cross remain the official symbol of the county.
