LA County has caved on the ACLU complaint about their seal (as earlier reported here).
Los Angeles County supervisors on Tuesday ended an emotional debate over the symbolism of the tiny gold cross on the county seal by deciding to remove it rather than defend it against a threatened ACLU lawsuit.
Advised by county attorneys that the cross might not withstand a court challenge, the Board of Supervisors voted to seek a compromise with the ACLU — perhaps by replacing the cross with images of a Spanish mission and Native Americans..
There was some indication that the cross had been intended as a religious, vs. historic, statement when originally included in the seal’s design in 1957:
But a review of the transcript from a 1956 Board of Supervisors meeting reveals that, at the time, the cross was intended as a religious symbol. After some speakers joked about what they considered an emaciated cow, Kenneth Hahn praised the seal for depicting “the cultural and educational and the religious life of this county.”
Is that impermissible? Would it be worse (or only a problem) if Hahn had specifically mentioned “the Christian life of this county”? Does what the seal mean to people now (in parts and as a whole) outweigh what it meant then?
I don’t know. I’m not sure that redesigning things to have a Mission and a Native American (shoehorned into a small space, unless we’re talking about a major redesign or dropping other elements) is going to work in the long run, either.
But Molina, who is Catholic, quietly pointed out that “there are many people who argue that the missions were not a great part of our history. The reality is that they were built by slaves.”
And, of course, there’s that cow that’s there to be butchered, those oil derricks destroying the environment, that huge pagan goddess, that Spanish conquistator ship, and all those other nasssssty symbols.
We’ll see.
(via Volokh)