Mayor of Los Angeles-Area City: Grow as "Christian Community"

Posted by Dr. Tom Connections, Intolerance + Bigotry, Religion & Politics, US Monday, February 1st, 2010

The mayor of the sixth-largest city in Los Angeles County turned his state-of-the-city speech into a call to Christian repentance and growth as a “Christian community” as he supports a ballot measure to permit Christian prayer at City Council meetings.

Lancaster, CA is the sixth-largest city in Los Angeles County. Its population is about 150,000; not a bustling metropolis, but not a backwater burg, either. NBC Los Angeles reports that Mayor R. Rex Parris, presently up for re-election, veered from the expected subjects of his January 28 State of the City speech to urge citizens to support a local ballot measure.

The measure? It’s available online here. Three measures are up for vote on April 13, 2010. The third, Measure I, asks:

In response to a recent complaint, with respect to the invocations that contained reference to Jesus Christ, shall the City Council continue its invocation policy in randomly selecting local clergy of different faiths to deliver the invocation without restricting the content based on their beliefs, including references to Jesus Christ?

The complaint the measure references was made by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State.

The measure itself is bad enough, in that it makes clear that the Council has local clergy lead prayers at City Council meetings. But Parris’s comments made the real meaning of the measure perfectly clear:

We’re growing a Christian community, and don’t let anybody shy away from that.

“We’re growing a Christian community”. Not, “We’re a growing, Christian community,” but “We’re growing a CHRISTIAN community.”

There was a bit more, apparently only reported at Breitbart and in far greater detail in the Antelope Valley Press:

“We’re growing a Christian community, and don’t let anybody shy away from that,” he told an audience of 160 people, mainly pastors and their spouses, during his State of the City address Tuesday at the John P. Eliopulos Hellenic Center.

He said he wants the community’s electorate to validate a Christian stance in the April municipal election, in which a ballot measure endorses prayers at city meetings, specifically with permission to invoke a specific deity, including Jesus.

While Parris, who is running for a second term as mayor in April, said he didn’t care which candidates the voters favored, “I do want them voting for that prayer amendment,” referring to a measure asking voters whether or not the City Council should seek religious guidance before its meetings.

The council put the measure on the ballot after the American Civil Liberties Union sent the city a letter of warning that said allowing “sectarian” prayers, such as those that mention Jesus Christ, at government meetings is divisive and unconstitutional.

“I need them standing up and saying we’re a Christian community, and we’re proud of that,” he said, speaking as his multimedia PowerPoint demonstration flashed a big-screen picture with a large Christian cross and the phrase “2010 Growing a Christian Community.”

Now it gets really strange.

Parris maintained in post-speech remarks that a Christian city had a better sense of community than what he described as an “atheistic city,” and said the progress Lancaster has made over the past several years came about because of the sense of cooperation between the various elements in the city.

As a prime example, he referred to the recently announced 31% drop in the Lancaster crime rate in the past two years, commenting, “That 31% is the difference between a city that is dangerous to live in vs. a city that is safe to live in.”

So . . . Christianity is new to Lancaster? It’s only been there since 2007? Or has Lancaster long been a “hotbed of Bible-thumpin’ activity”?

Church-state separation activists, Parris says, “want … a fight. They want their 15 minutes of fame.”

Apparently, some folks in Lancaster want to bring the fight to the activists.

In 2008, City Councilor Sherry Marquez brought forward a proposal to display an “In God We Trust” sign in the Council chambers. Debbie Phillips, a Lancaster resident who believes in the separation of church and state, spoke out at the May 13 meeting where the issue was being debated. As is customary, she was required to provide her address to demonstrate residency.

The Council passed the measure unanimously, and the sign is proudly displayed in the chambers. As for Phillips?

On May 29, she found the words “In God We Trust or?” scrawled in shoe polish in foot-high letters across two windows and a sliding-glass door of her house.

She called the police to report the vandalism. Said Sgt. Michael Willoughby:

Because of the nature of the event, we are going to submit it to the D.A. and let them decide. Based on experience, unless there’s actual damage, it doesn’t really fall under the vandalism section.

I wonder if an arrest would be made if “Your God is Imaginary” were scrawled in shoe polish on the side of a church in Lancaster. Anyone care to bet?

Phillips wasn’t thrilled with that response.

I feel like this is a message from the local religious community telling me they are more powerful than I am. This is also a violation of my First Amendment rights. I don’t appreciate them coming onto my property and defacing it.

Some would say Phillips shouldn’t be surprised. After all, Lancaster has a history of hosting irrational Bible-beaters. It was even home to renowned Biblical pseudoscientist Charles K. Johnson, President of the Flat Earth Society from 1971 until his death in 2004.

Though now based in London, the Flat Earth Society provides an extensive Online Library of Flat Earth writings and a Discussion Forum which you can join.

You’ll be pleased to know that, for the first time since 2001, the Flat Earth Society reopened to new members in October of 2009.

During his time in Lancaster, Johnson shared some interesting thoughts.

He believe[d] that the Apollo moon missions were a massive hoax perpetrated by the US government. “You can’t orbit a flat earth,” sa[id] Mr. Johnson. “The Space Shuttle is a joke–and a very ludicrous joke.”

Johnson was living in Lancaster back in 1980, when Science Digest interviewed him.

Nobody knows anything about the true shape of the world. The known, inhabited world is flat. Just as a guess, I’d say that the dome of heaven is about 4,000 miles away, and the stars are about as far as San Francisco is from Boston.

But that’s not all. Did you know that the UN’s symbol is identical to the Flat Earth Society’s map?

“Uncle Joe (Stalin), Churchill, and Roosevelt laid the master plan to bring in the New Age under the United Nations,” Johnson discloses with confidence. “The world ruling power was to be right here in this country. After the war, the world would be declared flat and Roosevelt would be elected first president of the world. When the UN Charter was drafted in San Francisco, they took the flat-earth map as their symbol.”

Why declare the world flat? Johnson responds that a prophesied condition for world government (Isaiah 60:20) is that the “sun shall no more go down.” This could be fulfilled by admitting that sunrise and sunset are optical illusions. The UN did adopt for its official seal a world map identical with the one on Johnson’s office wall. But Franklin Roosevelt died coincident with the UN’s birth, and the other imminent events described by Johnson never came about.

That’s enough about Charles Johnson. Point being, there have been loonies in Lancaster for decades. Ms. Phillips, are you really surprised? I mean, did you even look at your city’s logo?

IT HAS A CROSS IN IT!

Update: Naturally, some Christians are horrified that some Americans are willing to stand up to violations of the Establishment Clause in the US Constitution and demand that religion not be a part of government.

Says Iggy:

Welcome to Obama’s “Hate Crime” law…if you are Christian and make pro-Christian statements that directly or indirectly insults anyone not Christian, be ready to face the “Hate Crime Bill”…

That’s right, the Constitution is now “Obama’s Hate Crime Bill”!

Related articles:

1. Lancaster, CA Voters Approve of City Council Prayers
2. British mayor swaps council prayers for poems
3. Canada: Will God be Toronto's next city manager?
4. FFRF warns prayerful South Carolina public boards
5. Questions loom over city building