posted on June 14, 2004 04:33:50 PM new
Los Angeles name too godly for U.S.?
Some constitutional experts think reference to 'angels' spells trouble
Posted: June 13, 2004
6:22 p.m. Eastern
The city of Los Angeles may have to change its name.
Also, cities like San Francisco, San Diego, and Santa Barbara could be looking for new monikers.
The reason?
They all have religious meaning in their names.
Los Angeles refers to the "City of Angels," while the others refer to names of saints. In fact, the official name of Los Angeles is "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the Little Portion."
According to the Los Angeles Daily News, a strong legal argument could be made to force municipal name changes, based on the argument the names violate the so-called separation of church and state.
The issue is being raised in the wake of the decision last week by Los Angeles County to remove a small cross from its official seal, as reported by WorldNetDaily.
"That's absolutely right," Joerg Knipprath, a professor of constitutional law at the Southwestern University School of Law, told the Daily News.
"The cross is a minor symbol on the county seal whereas Los Angeles is the 'City of Angels.' San Clemente, Santa Monica, Sacramento, San Francisco, etc., are all religious references. It's far-fetched at this point. I don't think it's going to happen in the next ten years. But if somebody said ten or 20 years ago that we were going to challenge the Pledge of Allegiance or this tiny little cross on the county seal, the argument would have been that was far-fetched too."
Ironically, the most prominent image in the L.A. County seal is one of Pomona, the pagan Roman goddess of fruits and nuts, though the American Civil Liberties Union did not object to the goddess in its push to have the cross removed.
Douglas Kmiec, a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, told the News based on its history, the ACLU or others will likely challenge the mention of religion at graduations and the names of cities with religious identification.
"The logic of the ACLU's reasoning would suggest that Santa Monica should be renamed Monica, San Diego should be renamed Diego and on down the line," he said. "Los Angeles is a similar reference to angels. The full title of Los Angeles is a distinctly religious name."
The ACLU stresses it only becomes involved in issues when contacted by someone about a potential problem, and doesn't expect the names of metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles to become an issue.
"That has got to be one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard," ACLU spokesman Tenoch Flores said. "Nobody is considering suing to change city names. If anybody were to bring such a suit, it would be laughed out of court and rightfully so. We don't go around looking for things, but we certainly don't back down in the face of criticism if it's determined that a constitutional issue is at stake."
Jay Sekulow of the Virginia-based American Center for Law and Justice told the paper last week's fight over the county seal is merely part of a growing trend.
"[The goal is to] purge all religious observances and references from American public life. Will [opponents] try to get the name of Los Angeles changed? Sure. Why not, if they can get the cross removed from the seal?"
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why — with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." —Jay Leno
posted on June 14, 2004 05:01:02 PM new
"but we certainly don't back down in the face of criticism if it's determined that a constitutional issue is at stake."
BS - that tiny little cross signifying the CA Missions wasn't a 'constitutional issue' being at stake. And just what harm do they say the tiny cross was causing? There was no harm to anyone. It's their agenda to wipe from our history and culture backgrounds any mention of religion.
All the more reason for those who can - to make as large a contribution to the *ACLJ* [American Center for Law and Justice]. They fight issues like this that the ACLU goes after to force these changes and defend people for their rights that are being taken away.
posted on June 14, 2004 07:15:48 PM new
Well if they are going to change names because of 'religious themes' to them, a lot of cities and towns are going to have to be renamed.
Santa in Spanish is Saint.
Geez there's Santa Barbara, Santa Fe,
OH wow, theres St. Louis and Saint Paul, and those are in English
I know there is more.
I demand to know who named these cities 'Christian' names!
posted on June 14, 2004 07:27:35 PM new
First thing that had to be changed was the sports teams names that had something to do with indians, now it's the cities with religious conotations I bet next it will be proper names that don't conform to their ideas.
posted on June 15, 2004 10:28:04 AM newbut I really want to know what they were thinking when they named cities after Saints!
Western cities named after saints, like San Francisco, were named by the Spanish who founded them. In the Spanish tradition, all cities and towns have a Patron Saint to whom the town is dedicated. Some cities are actually named for the Patron. I think, but am not sure, that St. Louis and some others may have been named by the French, who have a similar tradition.
The word Santa, in Spanish, can mean 'saint', if used with a feminine noun, for example Santa Clara (St. Claire). Santa also means "holy", as in the full name of Santa Fe New Mexico, which is "La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asis", which means "The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi."
There will be a quiz tomorrow. Study.
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When a dog howls at the moon, we call it religion. When he barks at strangers, we call it patriotism. - Edward Abbey
posted on June 15, 2004 10:41:28 AM new
Maybe we could just convince these megalomaniacal PCers that animals AND plants should not be eaten. You know you're violating nature and God when you consume another living creature, some BS like that. Then we could just kick back and watch them all starve to death.
What a day for a daydream, what a day for a daydreaming guuuuuy....
____________________
You know...the best way to defeat a liberal is to let them speak.
posted on June 15, 2004 10:50:56 AM new
Profe, I didn't study!
::raising hand wildly::
I have a question, ok, I understand why those cities were named with Spanish names, but how the heck did they come up with St. Paul and St. Louis??? Bet I could think of more, if my geography was better
posted on June 15, 2004 01:12:36 PM new
Well....speed read this.
CULTURAL
Sects and the city
By ACLU logic, many cities have names that violate the Constitution
By Gene Edward Veith
SOMEONE AT THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES Union has apparently, with the help of a magnifying glass, spotted a miniscule cross in the seal of the city of Los Angeles. The detail is part of the seal that represents the city's historical heritage, which is traced back to early Spanish missions.
But the ACLU is suing to have the cross expunged as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.
City seals have been targets of the ACLU and their allies for some time. The pattern has usually been to go into some small town and object loudly to a religious allusion on a logo that dates from less sensitive days, and threaten a lawsuit. Usually, the town—not wanting to use taxpayer money in court, even if it might win—caves.
But why is it that militant secularists are so outraged over visual symbols but are oblivious to actual words? There is a little cross in the city seal, but the very name "Los Angeles" means "the Angels." This refers not to the baseball team in Anaheim but to the spiritual beings whose existence is affirmed by Christian teaching. The case will presumably be heard in the capital of California, "Sacramento," the Spanish word for "sacrament."
The 9th Circuit federal appeals court, which ruled to censor the word "God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, meets in "San Francisco," a city named after St. Francis.
Why strain at the gnat of visual images (which in this case is about the size of a gnat) while swallowing references to Christianity in language (although admittedly often a foreign language) that are everywhere in American place names? Shouldn't the separation of church and state mandate the separation of church and geography?
Many American cities are named for Roman Catholic saints. California has, according to a rough count from the atlas, 60 of them, from Santa Ana (St. Anne) to San Ysidro (St. Isador). And it isn't just California that does this. Missouri has 21 cities named after saints, from St. Louis to Ste. Genevieve. Texas has 27 cities whose names begin with "St." or "San" or "Santa."
Does that mean that Roman Catholicism is the established religion of those cities? Should Protestants who do not agree with veneration of saints file lawsuits against these cities?
posted on June 15, 2004 01:26:57 PM new
How about one that isn't a saint: Corpus Christi (Body of Crist).
And what else is the ACLU after, read on. (Thsi following is a op ed from a black woman.
ACLU's War Against the Poor
By Star Parker
June 14, 2004
Storm troopers of the American Civil Liberties Union have chalked up their latest victory in their ongoing campaign to stamp out any hint of religion in American public life.
Under threat of an ACLU-initiated lawsuit, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to remove a small cross from the seal of the State of California because of its alleged unconstitutional endorsement of Christianity.
Contrary to ACLU claims, these actions make our country less rather than more free.
This is of more than academic interest to me. The ACLU has invaded my home turf. The headquarters of my organization, the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), is in Los Angeles. But, more importantly, the ACLU is invading my turf in an ideological battle for the hearts, minds and souls of African-Americans in deeply damaged inner-city communities that CURE works to help rehabilitate.
ACLU has my folks targeted. From the ACLU Web site: "We work also to extend rights to segments of our population that have traditionally been denied their rights, including Native Americans and other people of color; lesbians, gay men and transgendered people; mental-health patients; prisoners; people with disabilities; and the poor. If the rights of society's most vulnerable members are denied, everybody's rights are imperiled."
My constituency is the poor, particularly the African-American poor, and I have a far different sense of what this community's problems and needs are than does the ACLU.
It is instructive, for instance, to scan through the groups that ACLU has lumped together under its umbrella of the oppressed. Freedom means nothing if one does not believe that, at the individual level, people have some kind of free choice. However, apparently for the scholars at the ACLU, there is no distinction in the role that personal choice plays regarding one's race, criminal behavior, sexual lifestyle, physical disabilities or economic status.
I started CURE 10 years ago as result of my personal experience with the welfare state and my conviction that its politics and programs destroy the very communities they claim to help. After seven years on welfare, I saw how the politics of entitlement and victimization destroy human dignity and initiative and produce slaves on a government welfare plantation rather than free, responsible human beings. My personal experience, along with data showing the damage that 40 years of welfare state politics has produced in America's inner-cities, paints a convincing picture that the welfare state/ACLU worldview produces anything but freedom and free men and women.
The truth of the matter is that the ACLU crusade against religion is a crusade against the core religious and moral values that have essentially been the software of the success of American freedom. The smokescreen under which this operation takes place is an illusion that for every religious symbol purged, we produce a more neutral and fair country. This is anything but true. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the purge of one value amounts to its replacement with another. In this case, traditional values of right, wrong and personal responsibility are displaced by relativism, materialism and, ultimately, the product of both of these, nihilism.
The civil-rights movement was defined by religion and moral passion. It was led by a black Christian pastor who never could have weathered the storm of daily death threats without being driven by a deep personal faith. His most famous speech, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, was laced with references to God and faith and a coming together of God's children.
As the civil-rights movement became politicized by ACLU-type liberals, values and personal responsibility were displaced by victimization politics. The result has been a social catastrophe in the African-American community. Thanks again to ACLU-type liberals, public schools that black children are forced to attend have purged all traditional values from education and, as a result, children have no clue why they are there and what the point is in education. These children are already most likely severely disadvantaged by coming from broken homes, also the product of the political purge of traditional values.
We now pay tribute to a great American president, Ronald Reagan, who inspired our nation with the vision of Puritan leader John Winthrop of a "city on a hill." Traditional values are woven into the fabric of America. African-Americans have paid a dear price for unfortunate moments in American history when they were not viewed as part of that fabric.
Let's not confuse a free and tolerant society with one with no moral underpinnings. Those moral underpinnings make it all possible.
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Star Parker is president of CURE, the Coalition for Urban Renewal and Education (www.urbancure.org). She is author of "Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What You Can Do About It."
"The Secret Service has announced it is doubling its protection for John Kerry. You can understand why — with two positions on every issue, he has twice as many people mad at him." —Jay Leno
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