According to a report from Todd Starnes, An outside anti-religion group is going after a Missouri county seal because it has a cross and Bible, among other symbols.
St. Francois County’s seal is up for a redesign after it went viral online when a Reddit user posted it under a “CrappyDesign” thread and it was lambasted for its appearance. But the Freedom From Religion Foundation called it an “inappropriate” image on Monday for another reason.
FFRF stated: “The religious significance of the Latin cross is unambiguous and indisputable,” Legal Fellow Karen Heineman wrote in a letter to Saint Francois County Presiding Commissioner Harold Gallaher. “A majority of federal courts agree that the Latin cross universally represents the Christian religion and only the Christian religion.”
Heineman also cited a federal district decision out of Missouri finding that a fish symbol in one quadrant of a city’s seal was undeniably a religious symbol.
“The county should remove exclusionary religious images from its official representations as a matter of policy,” she added. The county represents a diverse population with diverse religious views. Thirty-five percent of Americans today are non-Christian, including 29 percent of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated.
“While the county seal is being redesigned, it provides the perfect opportunity to address this constitutional violation by removing both the bible and the Latin cross,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Saint Francois County is not a Christian county, Missouri is not a Christian state and the United States is not a Christian nation.”
