The ACLU and the LA County Seal

Los Angeles County has decided to remove a tiny cross from their county seal under threat of a lawsuit from the ACLU. A lot of Christians are up in arms about this, and for once I agree with them, at least in part. No one is a more outspoken proponent of separation of church and state than I am, as anyone who reads this blog regularly knows. But this is just silly. Why not just go after the name of the county? It does, after all, mean "the angels", and angels are purely religious entities. The entire history of California is saturated in Catholic history, that's why half the cities begin with "san", which means "saint" - they're all named after Catholic saints. A tiny cross on a county seal is hardly a threat to religious freedom, nor does it constitution an establishment of religion.

What we have here are two opposite overreactions. The ACLU of California is hysterically overreacting to a harmless symbol on a seal, and the demagogues of the religious right are, and will continue to be, hysterically overreacting to the ACLU. No, Mr. Falwell, this is not "anti-Christian persecution" and it's not the precursor to throwing Christians in the gas chambers. It's just a bunch of silliness on both sides.

But the local ACLU there needs a lesson in political reality and in the concept of fighting the battles that need to be fought. Pressing absurd lawsuits like that only leads to a backlash that diminishes the credibility of church/state separation when it actually does matter. I recommend that they reread the story of the boy who cried wolf.

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Agreed, the ACLU is over the top on this one.

But when religion and law get enmeshed, strange things can happen. In Utah this past week, U.S. District Judge Bruce Jenkins ruled that the Ten Commandments is not primarily a relgious document and so its display, in stone, in a public park does not violate the establishment clause. The decision is being appealed.[http://www.sltrib.com/2004/jun/06032004/opinion/172178.asp]
The case involved one of those Order of Eagles monuments to the Ten Cs given to towns all over the country [including Utah.] What I find amusing is religious crusaders here are ecstatic over their victory in court, apparently unconcerned at the court's conclusion that the Commandments are not relgious tenets. We can leave aside the reasoning of Justice Jenkins who apparently saw little religious content in statements like "I am the Lord thy God...."
Here in the Land of Perfection [Utah of course] there is another series of cases involving those Ten Commandments statues that has gone, and is going, quite differently. They are being brought not on establishment clause grounds, but on equal protection grounds. Ogden, UT had one of those Order of Eagles Ten Commandment statues in its downtown park when another religious group [Summin? I'm not very familiar with them.] sued the city for permission to erect, at its own cost, a monument in the same park to its relgious and moral principles [the Seven Principles or something like that.] The court ruled that Ogden could keep the Ten Commandments monument in the park, but then it must permit any and all other religions which wished to do so to erect similiar monuments to their founding princples as well. Or it could deny all religions the right to erect such monuments, in which case the Ten Commandments monument had to go to. Whatever policy the city adopted with respect to religious monuments in public parks, it had to apply equally to all religious groups. After squandering money on an appeal, which it lost, the city opted to remove the Ten Commandments monument. I think the ruling in that case was right on the money.
But finding that the Ten Commandments are not primarily relgious in meaning makes about as much sense as saying that little cross on the LA County seal constitutes state establishment of a religion.
Strange times, Ed. Strange times.

By flatlander100 (not verified) on 04 Jun 2004 #permalink

What flatlander said about the judge ruling the commandments to be not primarily religious, and the happy reaction by those in the religious establishment, seems to me to be part of a larger pattern. In the whole creationism/evolution argument, there has been a serious effort by the creationists to label their Intelligent Design arguement as scientific and not religious. So what is going on here? Do they think they're fooling someone when they say that these things aren't religious? (I guess they fooled the judge) Have they actually managed to perform the kind of double-think nessesary to promote a religious agenda by calling it non-religious? I wonder if there are more cases of this sort of thing.
Is this all a clever little ploy to get around the division of church and state, or is it a sign that an openly religious agenda doesn't play, and even the religious right knows it?

Kevin-

In the case of the evolution/creationism/ID issue, it is absolutely by "design" that they are avoiding any and all association with religion. That's because every previous attempt to put creationism into classrooms has been struck down on establishment clause grounds. The Wedge Strategy was developed primarily by Phil Johnson, who is an attorney. He knows that as a legal matter, the only way to pass muster is to pretend that ID is not a religious position at all. The courts are not going to allow religious alternatives to scientific theories to be mandated in public schools, so they have to pretend not be a religious alternative but a scientific one. But of course they can't point to any actual scientific achievements, nor do they offer an actual model from which testable hypotheses flow, and that is the hallmark of a scientific theory as opposed to a non-scientific one. So they muddy the waters.

There are two types of articles in the scientific literature about ID: articles by ID advocates that have nothing to do with ID, and articles by scientists pointing out why ID makes no sense. Dembski goes so far as to pretend that both of those things amount to support for ID in the scientific literature! Take this astonishing quote from a recent article by Dembski:

At the Design and Its Critics conference (Concordia University, Mequon, summer 2000), Kenneth Miller claimed that Michael Behes notion of irreducible complexity was nowhere to be found in the mainstream, peer-reviewed biological literature. Yet, in fact, Thornhill and Ussery had several months earlier published an article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology on that very topic.

There's just one problem with this claim - the Thornhill and Ussery article, available here - argues against irreducible complexity, not for it. Dave Ussery is a biochemist who has been critical of Behe's claims, and this paper examines the various ways in which allegedly IC systems can be constructed by mutation and selection. So the only example that Dembski could come up with, and the basis for his implication that Ken Miller had somehow fudged the truth about IC in the literature, was one article showing why irreducible complexity is not a problem for evolution.

As far as articles written by ID advocates but not about ID, they love to point to Henry Schaefer, an ID advocate who has allegedly published over 1000 articles. But there's two problems with this. First, not a single one of those articles actually has anything to do with ID. Second, his publishing rate is something like a paper every 4 days. No scientist could possibly write that many papers. He is taking credit for his students' papers, almost certainly, which is not unusual for professors to do. But it makes it pretty silly when the number of publications he has gets trumpeted by the ID crowd as a measure of scientific achievement.