Petitioners Rush To Restore L.A. County Cross before Deadline
The committee spearheading the initiative to restore the cross on the L.A. County Seal must submit over 170,000 petition signatures to the County's Register Recorder Office by 5:00 p.m. today to qualify the measure for the June 2006 ballot.
LOS ANGELES – The committee spearheading the initiative to restore the cross on the L.A. County Seal must submit over 170,000 petition signatures to the County's Register Recorder Office by 5:00 p.m. today to qualify the measure for the June 2006 ballot.
"Every signature counts. It doesn't matter if it's last minute," David Hernandez, chairman of the Committee to Support the Los Angeles County Seal Ordinance, told the Christian Post Sunday night.
According to the group's website on Monday morning, the absolute deadline to submit petition signatures to the group's headquarters in Sylmar in North San Fernando Valley will be Monday afternoon at two o’clock. Representatives of the Committee plan to make a 15-minute stop at the L.A. County Republican Party Headquarters in Commerce before heading to the County's Register Recorder Office in Norwalk.
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"We don't want to take any chances, considering traffic," Hernandez continued. "We had hoped to be done two weeks ago but things didn't work out that way."
Numbers on the Committee's website on Sunday report that 122,414 signatures have been collected – leaving 47,586 remaining to meet the petition signature quota.
Although the pressure of meeting the impending deadline has been growing, local churches and registered L.A. County voters have risen to the call.
Churches from all over L.A. County used Sunday masses and services as opportunities to collect last-minute signatures from congregants. Among them were Crenshaw Christian Center in Los Angeles and St. Monica's in Santa Monica. According to Hernandez, Catholic churches and groups such as the Knights of Columbus have been really engaged in the effort.
Specific numbers are yet to be finalized from the churches' petitions but Hernandez estimated around 5,000 signatures were tallied up at a petition drop-off site at his home and around 2,500 - 3,000 more were gathered during a petition signing event at an Armenian Independence Day celebration at Verdugo Park in Glendale on Sunday.
Hernandez said Armenians could empathize with the attack on the L.A. County Seal because they experienced religious persecution firsthand during 1915 when 1.5 million Armenians died in genocide at the hands of Ottoman Turkish forces. An article published in The Middle East Quarterly reported that several hundred thousand Christians died by starvation or were murdered during the deportation of the Armenians from Anatolia to the Syrian Desert and elsewhere in 1915-16.
"Most Americans don't understand religious persecution. We don't have the historical reference like the Armenian community or the Jewish community have. When we think about persecution, it's not in the same context," he said. "Here you have a culture where you had what religious persecution could lead to and did lead to."
Hernandez said he had hoped the Armenian community could help educate Americans on the dangers of religious persecution. Because people are unaware of the issue, efforts to garner enough signatures in last two petitions drives were unsuccessful, he added.
The L.A. County Board of Directors voted to replace the 1957 version of the Seal after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) threatened suit unless the cross was removed from the Seal, alleging the cross was a government endorsement of religion.
Supporters of cross including County Supervisors Mike Antonovich and Don Knabeargue, who voted against its removal, argue that the cross is a cultural and historical symbol.
Hernandez said he has seen people work their hearts out but noted that regardless of the outcome, "We have no regrets."
More information on the petition drive can be found at the Committee to Support the Los Angeles County Seal Ordinance website, www.savetheseal.net.
