Editorial: Let the ruling stand on the L.A. County seal cross

Regarding the legal and political fracas over the Christian cross that was on, then off, then again on and now again off the official Los Angeles County seal, let’s hope a federal judge’s sensible ruling Thursday — to remove whatever crosses have recently been added on to various iterations of the seal — puts the issue permanently to rest.

A majority of county supervisors ordered the seal to be redesigned without the cross more than a decade ago in part to avoid a costly lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. But in 2014 a slightly reconstituted majority of the board invited the suit anyway by putting the cross back, in a different place and with a somewhat far-fetched theory about why it didn’t constitute a government endorsement of a particular religion.

After a sort of seal cold war, in which versions with and without the cross appeared on various county websites, flags and stationery, and after the county spent much time and public money on the issue, we are exactly where the county’s lawyers confidentially advised the Board of Supervisors we would be: with a court order to remove the cross.

The argument that history and architectural accuracy, rather than religion, required adding the cross to a tiny drawing of Mission San Gabriel Arcángel completely misses the point. The problem was not just the depiction of the cross, but the fact that the county took the affirmative step of adding it to a seal that had existed for so long without it. The board had once removed it in the belief that its presence furthered a sectarian purpose, or at least that a court would rule that it did. So returning it, the federal court reasoned, constituted affirmative aid to the Christian religion. “Permitting such a change and the associated expenditure of public funds, places the county’s power, prestige and purse behind a single religion, Christianity, without making any such benefit available on an equal basis to those with secular objections or alternative sectarian views,” wrote U.S. District Judge Christina A. Snyder.

If the explanation for the board’s action is that this is a Christian nation with a Christian heritage, the proper response is not that this is a secular nation, but rather that it is a nation in which faith is properly the province of individual conscience and expression, and that government exists not to promote or condemn any expression of faith, notwithstanding history, heritage or majority vote, but to protect the individual’s dominion over that aspect of existence.

This has been a needlessly long and costly civics lesson. Is it finally concluded? It ought to be, and will be — unless the supervisors vote to waste even more time and more money by appealing the ruling.

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