Boise News

Updated Tuesday May 22

Idaho County Quietly Puts Cross in Official Seal

By Nathaniel Hoffman, 5-17-07

Update May 23:  Idaho’s NBC affiliate, KTVB, is now reporting this story as well as the Idaho Press-Tribune and KTRV Fox Channel 12. 

NewWest.Net/Boise’s report from May 17 follows.

Six years ago I wrote a series of articles about religion in Canyon County, the rapidly developing mass of farm country west of Boise.

Looking at the yellowed tabloid today I am struck by two things.

The first is how far we went in order to demonstrate that this conservative Southwest Idaho county did have a diverse religious history. The 24-page pullout begins with Native American religion and the Buddhist practice of 19th century Chinese immigrants. It then goes on to describe 21 different denominations of Christianity (including Catholics and Mormons), interspersed with tales of local Jews, Muslims, Hindus and an active Baha’i community.

The second thing I notice is the cover: a giant white cross under a foreboding stormy sky.

In these parts crosses and other Christian symbols are everywhere. On billboards along the road. On hills above towns. In parks. Near crash scenes. In the newspaper.

And in 2005 the Canyon County commissioners added one to their redesigned county seal. They included a small church and cross in the new emblem, meant to show a “consistent message,” according to the minutes of the November 2005 commission meeting where the seal was approved.

The idea for a new seal originated with Commissioner David Ferdinand, who wanted to consolidate several county seals into a single official symbol. County spokeswoman Angie Sillonis told me that all three of Canyon County’s elected commissioners wanted religion to be depicted in the county seal alongside agriculture, family, education, industry and outdoor recreation.

Ferdinand proposed the change just months after Los Angeles County supervisors voted to remove a cross from their official seal. LA County, faced with a lawsuit over the constitutionality of its 1950’s era seal, changed it to a more secular theme.

Randy Hooban, of Caldwell, first saw his county’s new seal in January at a Canyon County Democratic Central Committee meeting and contacted the American Civil Liberties Union of Idaho. The ACLU is looking into the constitutionality of the cross but has not determined if it passes muster, according to a staff attorney.

Hooban is pretty sure it does not.

“Government is supposed to be separating church and state and I think it’s an absolute violation of the state constitution,” Hooban said. Not to mention the U.S. Constitution.

There is a laundry list of cases to back that up.

Legal battles in Oklahoma, Illinois, New Mexico and most recently in California have made it abundantly clear that the portrayal of religious symbolism on city and county emblems is unconstitutional. One exception is if there is a very good historical reason behind the portrayal, as in the seal of Las Cruces (The Crosses), New Mexico, which the ACLU declined to challenge.

Just this week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, of which Idaho is a part, ruled that Los Angeles County was correct in removing the cross from its seal three years ago to avoid a first amendment suit.

Still, there are subtleties involved. A constitutional law professor at Albertson College, a small liberal arts college located in Canyon County, said the local depiction in the county seal is not a slam dunk for a government establishment of religion challenge.

“I think you’d be hard pressed to argue that this is a blatant violation of the first amendment,” said Kerry Hunter, looking at the symbol on the county’s Web site. “But you could always try.”

Hunter said the cross is part of a montage of symbols, and that the context matters to the courts.

It says: “Christians are welcome in Canyon County but so are cows, tractors and whatever those other buildings are,” Hunter said.

Then he called me back to suggest that the motive behind the inclusion of the cross could make a difference.

So I called Jenny Fultz, the Nampa-based designer who drew the seal.

“I chose what I felt was one of the symbols that is most widely recognized as spirituality,” Fultz said. “When you see a cross you think of not just Christianity, but religion in general.”

Fultz, a graphic designer whose niche is Christian colleges and institutions, was the only designer to bid on the project. She knows Ferdinand through work they both did for Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa. Fultz provided a bunch of different designs to the county and made up to 40 revisions for commissioners.

Her initial estimate for the work was $1,500.

In early versions of the design that Sillonis sent me, the cross is larger and backlit. Fultz made revisions based on comments from the commissioners, eventually making the cross a bit more subtle. At one point in the design process it looks like the cross was removed, but it ended up in the final version.

Just a few weeks ago, In preparing a potential legal defense of the seal, the county asked Fultz if the church she drew was based on a historical building in the county.

It wasn’t.

Ferdinand, who took the seal around the County Courthouse and to his Rotary Club meeting personally eliciting public comment, is no stranger to religious controversy.

He is a former board member of the now defunct Idaho Christian Coalition and longtime organizer of the county’s annual God and Country Rally that touts America’s Christian heritage in the week prior to the 4th of July.

In some towns the placement of a cross on the county seal would have at least raised eyebrows. But in Canyon County the cross was not even noted in several short articles in the local paper (where I used to work). The county received one phone call, Sillonis said, and no online votes on the seal change.

There was apparently no discussion of the change at any open commission meeting, nor at the final meeting when the seal was approved.

Fultz said that religion is a big part of the culture of the county and she could not just leave it out of the design.

“It is a conservative area – this is not east coast or west coast, it’s Idaho,” the artist said. “When you’re a designer you have to be able to communicate a huge idea with a small brush stroke. I chose a fish to represent wildlife and not a duck and not a bird of prey.”

But there is a legal difference between representations of wildlife and symbols of religion and the cross is generally viewed as a wholly Christian symbol.

“It doesn’t represent religion in general, it represents a specific religious perspective,” said Peter Simonson, executive director of the ACLU in New Mexico, which won a precedent setting church-state government seal case in the 1980s.

“The purpose of the Bill of Rights is not to protect the interests of the majority. It’s to hold out a space to protect the interests and the well being and the livelihood of the minority,” Simonson said.

In the 1985 New Mexico case, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, “Religious minorities may not be made to feel like outsiders because of government’s malicious or merely unenlightened endorsement of the majority faith.”

Whether Canyon County’s move was malicious or merely unenlightened remains to be seen. Perhaps coming soon to a courtroom near you…

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