Dorena Osborn knew the town deliberate to take away her beloved Albany Hill cross from its perch overlooking California’s East Bay, nevertheless it was nonetheless a shock when she arrived on the hillside final month to search out the enormous landmark lacking.
She and the cross go manner again. Her grandparents positioned the cross on the website in 1970. She and her household attend the annual Easter dawn and Christmas providers there. Her mom’s memorial service and her youthful son’s dedication ceremony have been held there. Her husband even proposed to her on the cross.
“We go there regularly to pray at about 8 a.m., and when we got there, it was gone,” Ms. Osborn instructed The Washington Times. “It was traumatic.”
The 28-foot metal-and-plexiglass cross could also be out of sight, however that doesn’t imply it’s forgotten. Far from it.
Attorneys for the town of Albany and the Albany Lions Club squared off Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco over the town’s choice to invoke eminent area to take the membership’s easement, which has been utilized by worshipers for 50 years to entry and keep the cross.
The Lions Club was granted the easement as a part of a 1973 deal wherein the town acquired the 1.1-acre property from a third-party developer who bought the parcel from Hubert Call, a group chief and Ms. Osborn’s grandfather. The land was subsequently changed into a public park.
The association labored for many years. In 2015, nevertheless, a bunch known as East Bay Atheists started elevating questions concerning the cross’s constitutionality. Albany’s mayor criticized the Lions Club in 2017 for lighting up the cross, which is fitted with fluorescent bulbs, on the anniversary of 9/11.
“I want to reiterate that neither the City Council nor the City of Albany endorses in any way the lighting of the cross for any occasion, religious or nationalistic, or supports its continued presence on public property,” stated then-Mayor Peggy McQuaid in a 2017 assertion.
Litigation ensued, and in 2018, U.S. District Judge William Alsup dominated that the cross violated the Establishment Clause. The metropolis was confronted with a selection: Either promote to a personal social gathering the small plot of floor on which the cross rested or purchase the easement by eminent area and take away the cross.
The City Council selected the latter, passing a decision in April 2022 to sentence the easement. U.S. District Judge Somnath Raj Chatterjee granted the town’s request for prejudgment possession of the cross pending the result of the Lions Club’s lawsuit over the eminent-domain motion.
The cross was eliminated June 8 over the objections of the Lions Club, which provided final yr to purchase the “underlying fee interest in the lot containing the cross from the City.”
“The cross would then be in private ownership — there would be no Establishment Clause problem,” stated the Lions Club criticism.
Why not settle for the supply? Albany Mayor Aaron Tiedemann stated eradicating the cross was “consistent with our values.”
“The city has actually put its money where its mouth is, and our city looks a little bit more accepting now in a way that we think is consistent with our values,” Mr. Tiedemann instructed the East Bay Times. “For the small local group of people that really want to see the cross stay, when you’ve had such privilege for so long, losing it feels like being oppressed. That’s going to be an adjustment for folks, but I think we will all get used to it, and I think it’s a real benefit.”
In different phrases: The Albany City Council doesn’t need an outsized image of the Christian religion on show inside its metropolis limits, stated Lions Club President Kevin Pope.
“The City Council seem to hate what it represents, and rather than take an amount of money for the land and sell it to the Lions Club, they’ve decided to spend what we think is probably close to $1 million to resolve this issue, instead of doing the easy thing,” Mr. Pope stated. “That’s how much they hate it.”
The Lions Club lights up the Albany Hill cross yearly for Easter dawn providers and Christmas, a sight that critics have decried as paying homage to Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings, a lot to the chagrin of supporters.
“The city keeps bringing up cross-burnings in the 1920s, but they weren’t ever on Albany Hill,” Mr. Pope stated. “If that cross on that spot had been associated with cross-burnings, we would have taken it down ourselves.”
Ms. Osborn known as the KKK narrative “baloney,” pointing to a 1970 photograph of the cross’ dedication ceremony, which was carried out by a Black pastor.
She stated her grandparents by no means would have agreed to the 1973 deal with out the easement to guard the cross.
“The city should right their wrong,” Ms. Osborn stated. “What we’ve been trying to get the city to do is put the easement back into private land for the Lion’s Club to continue what it’s always been doing, which is preserving the easement. And that would end any First Amendment questions.”
Disputes over distinguished Christian crosses positioned on public property are nothing new, and plenty of have been resolved by promoting the patch of land beneath the Christian symbols.
In San Francisco, for instance, the historic Mount Davidson Cross was preserved after the town offered the landmark’s one-third acre parcel to the Council of Armenian-American Organizations of Northern California in 1997.
The Mount Soledad Cross in San Diego was saved when the Mt. Soledad Memorial Association purchased the land beneath the cross in 2015 from the Defense Department for $1.4 million, a transfer approved in laws signed the yr earlier than by President Barack Obama.
In 2017, the Neosho City Council in Missouri agreed to switch possession of a parcel on which sits a big cross at Big Spring Park to the nonprofit Save Our Heritage Foundation after complaints from atheist teams.
Supporters of the choice to take away the cross embody the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which applauded the town’s “determined defense of secularism.”
“It’s very gratifying and satisfying news to see the city do the right thing, even in a political climate that isn’t very supportive of separation of church and state,” stated basis President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “Kudos to Albany and their governance for fighting this and being so adamant.”
Even if the Lions Club wins its case, reinstalling the cross could show tough. Judge Alsup warned final yr that as a sensible matter, “once the cross is down, it is down for good,” given the probably challenges over zoning and allowing.
The metropolis stated it has positioned the cross in storage. Neither the Lions Club nor Ms. Osborn is aware of the place it’s.
“It’s a sacred place to many, but there’s a few loud, vocal people who hate it,” Mr. Pope stated. “But I believe the people who love it are a much bigger group than the people who don’t.”
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