The Eradication of American Heritage and Culture

If I had to express disappointment over any one measure that I supported that didn't pass on Tuesday, it would have to be the defeat of measure Q in Redlands. I used to live in Redlands. I began high school in Austin, Texas but finished it at Redlands High. My parents bought a house in "the City of the Churches". Dad tore down and rebuilt the kitchen and my bathroom in-between his work at Norton Air Force Base. My first high school jobs were while I was at Redlands, including teaching gymnastics at the YMCA. I definitely felt a certain sense of community in the 2 and a half years that I lived there, before going off to college and before my parents later moved to Japan. That said...

I am highly disappointed in Redlands. Measure Q did not pass, and it's like a kick in the gut. It's the same feeling I had when I thought John Kerry might be MY President. It's a feeling of living in alienation in your very own home; a realization that your fellow citizens don't share in your core values. I guess I just thought for certain that if the people were allowed to vote on it, (rather than city supervisors cowering before an ACLU lawsuit threat and basing their decision to remove it simply on the grounds of not wanting to spend money defending it), that they would elect to have it stay put, as is.

This is from the Redlands Values Coalition (Committee Against Measure Q) website:

Redlands Votes NO on Q
by Wide Margin!

Congratulations to Redlands and the Redlands Values
Coalition!

We're proud and gratified that so many fellow citizens
understood the importance of the deeper messages of
religion and democracy:

Respect for each other.

Respect for the law and the Constitution.

Our personal thank you to all of the Redlands Values
Coalition who worked so hard to fulfill our mission to
inform our fellow citizens of what was at stake in this
election, and who succeeded in keeping Redlands whole.

"Respect for each other"?!? Here's what it says in the San Bernardino County Sun today:

Many of those offended by the ACLU threats formed the Save Our Seal committee, which raised $7,390 and gathered petitions to put Measure Q on the ballot.

But other religious leaders formed the Redlands Values Coalition and said having a cross would send a message that non-Christians are unwelcome in Redlands. The group raised $17,441 to fight the ballot measure.

Excuse me! That is absolute rubbish. Worse than rubbish, it is pure crap! I am not Christian. How the hell am I being made to feel unwelcomed?! I keep coming across this lame statement about "feeling unwelcomed". Before a couple of busybodies decided to contact the ACLU, did anyone non-Christian really give a hoot about the tiny cross on the City Seal? C'mon....

40 years, and no one ever had a problem with it; it's only in recent times that it would appear the ACLU and radical fundamentalist militant atheists, intolerant of religious freedom and expression, have been on a jihad against all evidence of our Judeo-Christian culture and heritage appearing in the public square.


Even if I were personally offended by the cross on the city seal, that would be my problem. Not the City's. Since when do we have a right not to be offended by ANYTHING anyway? That's part of life. Get used to it. Quit suing everyone because your feelings are hurt, or you feel left out...quit playing the victim in life!!! Sometimes life hurts. Suck it up. Get over it. Move on.

We are obsessed with this notion of equality; but not all things are equal, nor should they be. Not all cultures have contributed equally to building this nation. The United States of America is built upon a foundation of Judeo-Christian values. Not Buddhist...not Islamic traditions...

That should not be ignored. It should not be carelessly wisked aside. It is the influence of those religious values that the ACLU wants to strip away from us, that have made it possible for America to have cultivated a society as free and diverse and WELCOMING as we have. We are so welcoming and tolerant, that we don't force immigrants with a vastly different background to completely abandon their heritage and culture; instead we encourage them to enrich our own, by adding to it. You don't accomplish this by diminishing the culture already established here. We do expect immigrants who wish to become Americans to learn the language and adopt the established culture; to become Americanized. Not to segregate yourself off; or to demand that the culture of your homeland be put on an equal footing with the one(s) that have been established here in America for generations. A certain amount of accomodating is reasonable; but I don't want to see ballots in ten different languages, because we have this silly notion of "equality". That's not my idea of the "Great American Melting Pot". The kind of America the ACLU and the PC police are pushing for is a kind of "America relativism". I reject that. Absolutely reject it!

People all over the world come to America, in part, because of our religous freedom. Not because we are known to repress and supress it from public expression. But this is what the militant secularists and religiously-intolerant ACLU are doing: they are remolding America in the image they wish it to become. Not preserving the wishes of the Founding Fathers. They want an America divorced of religious expression. Impoverished by any reference to God and religion, and Christianity in particular.

These secular-hadists aren't offended by the cross because of some screwed up interpretation of the First Amendment; they're offended by the cross, period. If they really were concerned about people feeling "unwelcomed", why display and endorse anything at all? I don't like oranges on the new seal...makes me feel unwelcomed....maybe it should be changed to a blank slate, so we don't risk offending anyone.

If you personally are made to feel unwelcomed because of a tiny seal on a city cross, you need therapy. Or just move away; and I hope the door does hit you on the way out.

What's next? Changing the names of our cities? "Los Angeles"...."Sacramento"....? As Dennis Prager pointed out today, if he was passing through a city founded by Muslims, he'd expect it to have an Arabic name with a Crecent on its City Seal. I wouldn't have a problem with that.

Hey! If not based on religious grounds, why shouldn't I express a feeling of "unwelcome" because those city names are in Spanish? I don't speak Spanish. As an English-speaking American, I'm offended and feel unwelcomed in my own city of Los Angeles. This ain't Mexico! If the U.S. Constitution did have an establishment language clause, wouldn't it be just as ridiculous for us to change city names to English ones, as it is to make a mountain over a molehill regarding tiny crosses on City and County Seals?


Here is a plea from the daughter of the Redlands City Seal logo designer:

My father, then Redlands Police Officer George W. Collins, designed the Redlands city seal in 1963. It was unanimously approved by the Redlands City Council.

The original seal remained until 2004 when the City Council voted to change the seal without voter approval.

The symbols on the seal were meant to represent the city of Redlands and they were not meant to endorse anything. Redlands has long been known as the "city of churches" and that is why the cross was placed on the seal. Some of the previous writers who wrote in claimed to be tolerant of other religions, but the fact that they wrote in to complain about the cross on the seal showed them to be intolerant.


That's exactly right. What happened to beauty in diversity? We have Chinatown, Little Tokyo, mosques, temples, etc, etc. Separation of Church and State is about the government not endorsing one particular church; but it doesn't mean government has to be free from religious expression. In court, we swear by the Bible to tell the truth and nothing but. My being nonreligious, I could care less if it were the Torah, the King James, or the Koran. I can show deference and respect to all three, as a law-abiding American citizen. America-critics like to point out what a racist society we are. But nowhere else on the face of the globe can you find a country with as much diversity and acceptance as we have. Where Christians, Jews, and Muslims...Hindus, Buddhists and atheists, are able to co-exist.


"What the framers of the Constitution meant when they wrote the First Amendment was only that the federal government- and only the federal government's Congress- was to be prohibited from establishing a national church, like the Church of England, or requiring that the sectarian policy be forced on an individual state or on the federal government. It did not mean that the government could censor public religious expression, deny churches and religious organizations equal access to public facilities, or the church and government could not work together."

- taken from The ACLU VS. America, by Alan Sears and Craig Osten.


Read more opinions from Redlands Residents in the Redlands Daily Facts.

Of related interest: Walmart Facing Boycott over Christmas ban at Stop The ACLU.

Freedom of Religion Watch over at B'osun's Locker

Previous posts:

In Whom Do We Trust?

Radical Atheistic Fundamentalist Extremism Vs. America