Editorial: Supervisor Antonovich, constituents can pick their own religious symbols

So Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich believes the Los Angeles Times is “secular extremest” [sic] because of an editorial this page wrote opposing his plan to put a Christian cross on the official county seal — a decade after an earlier cross was removed. The comment comes from an Antonovich email that was included in court filings about the seal.

Having now read the email and others in the same vein, we’d like to direct the supervisor’s attention to several points.

First off, the word is spelled “extremist.” With an “i.”

Also, supervisor, please don’t leave out this page’s criticism just last week of Irvine City Council members who wanted to post “In God We Trust” in huge letters on the wall behind them so that no one who attends the meetings could possibly miss the council’s political statement about God.

Come to think of it, we have also argued that public meetings should not begin with invocations to Jesus Christ, and that giant monuments to Christianity should not dominate military cemeteries that include the bodies of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, non-believers and others.

And if we’ve forgotten to say it before, we assert here and now that county employees and the members of the public whom county government is supposed to serve should not have to pass under a government-sponsored religious symbol just to get to work or to petition their elected representatives.

But that position is hardly extremist. Nor is it, to paraphrase another Antonovich email, a liberal attack on “God, family and freedom.”

To the contrary, at the core of American freedom is the conviction that worship belongs squarely in the realm of family and individual conscience. It is not for politicians such as Antonovich, or government bureaucrats or even the electorate as a group, to select for the rest of us the faiths, denominations, symbols or religious utterances that strike them as appropriate.

It’s odd that a government official who has for so long been skeptical of government’s role in private life would get so bent out of shape over The Times calling for government to mind its own business and leave faith and religious symbols to the people and their houses of worship.

But of course Antonovich’s argument — that the cross was added only to update the depiction on the county seal of Mission San Gabriel, which once had a cross, then didn’t, and now does again — was always disingenuous.

His vote to place the cross on the county seal years after the board voted to remove another one has little to do with architectural or historical accuracy. Antonovich wants politicians to pick and display our religious symbols for us. So, apparently, do Supervisors Don Knabe and Mark Ridley-Thomas, both of whom joined Antonovich last year in voting to put a cross back on the seal. No thank you, supervisors. Each of us will choose our own.

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