Despite Saying They Wouldn’t, Los Angeles County Officials Are Still Using a Seal With a Cross on It April 24, 2015

Despite Saying They Wouldn’t, Los Angeles County Officials Are Still Using a Seal With a Cross on It

For almost a decade now, this has been the seal of Los Angeles County in California:

There’s a lot going on there, but check out the center right image. That’s supposed to represent the Mission San Gabriel Arcangel, a Catholic mission dating back hundreds of years. It’s conspicuously missing a cross because, from 1987-2009, the actual building didn’t have one (due to it being destroyed in an earthquake, then stolen). It wasn’t until 2009 that the cross was restored on the building.

So last year, some members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors wanted to change the seal to reflect that. (Isn’t that convenient…?) The supervisors voted 3-2 to revise the seal to include the cross.

But that led to a challenge from the ACLU. In June, the supervisors agreed to drop the cross from the seal while the litigation was pending… but a new lawsuit filed by the ACLU of California says they’re still using the “revised” version:

Lawyers submitted evidence showing the cross on Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich’s website, a cover sheet for a recent Board of Supervisors meeting transcript and a program for the county-organized “Women of the Year” luncheon in March.

County officials say all these documents (with the Christian symbol) were printed before the agreement went into effect, but the ACLU claims that can’t be true since the revised seal appears on new documents, too:

“You can’t tell a court one thing and go and do the opposite,” ACLU of Southern California Executive Director Peter Eliasberg said in an interview this week. “Every time they come up with a new [supervisors meeting] agenda, they have a simple choice: use the old seal or use the new one.”

There is a simple way to fix this: Just go back to the old seal and start using it again. The cross isn’t that important (nor is it historically accurate). Get over it and move on to more pressing matters.

(via Religion Clause. Large portions of this article were published earlier)

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