Voters Reject Cross on City Logo

In Redlands, California, voters decided 60-40 not to restore a cross to the city logo. The ACLU had threatened to sue before the city council removed the logo and a few citizens sought to overturn this decision. Most voters, though, may have seen little sense in having their government supporting any one group's religion.

The Redlands Daily Facts reports:

“I’m really gratified that my fellow citizens have understood the importance of the deeper message of both religion and democracy and those messages are respect for each other and respect for the law and Constitution,” said Asher Sheppard, co-chairman for the Redlands Values Coalition, a group that launched a campaign against keeping a religious symbol on the 1963 city logo. [...]

Darrell Barker, the former Redlands resident who first objected to the cross in the late 1980s, was pleased by Tuesday’s results. “The defeat of Measure Q and its Christian cross is a real historic measure of Redlands’ growth and maturity, common-sense, tolerance and friendliness towards all its religious and non-religious citizens alike,” he said.

Supporters of government-endorsed religion think that those voting against the old logo either did so for financial reasons (losing a lawsuit would have been costly) or because they were simply confused about the issues. The former idea is certainly possible — there is a growing insistence among some conservatives that government agencies which lose First Amendment lawsuits to plaintiffs represented by the ACLU should not have to pay the winners’ legal bills. I guess they don’t like having to suffer the consequences for being wrong, which is an odd attitude for conservatives but not at all odd for unprincipled political opportunists.

 

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