By Todd Starnes, 6-7-17 at Fox News:
It was way back in 1930 when the good people of Neosho, Missouri installed a giant, lighted cross in the Big Spring Park.
The cross, about 60-feet long, was the centerpiece of the town’s annual Easter sunrise services. And while the sunrise services ended many years ago, the cross remained.
For the past 87 years, not a single person in the community complained about the emblem – until last May.
That’s when the town received a letter from an out-of-town group of atheists, agnostics and freethinkers. They demanded the cross be removed from public property.
“The government’s permanent display of a Latin cross on public land is unconstitutional,” Freedom From Religion Foundation attorney Rebecca Markert wrote in a letter to the town’s mayor.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is not very fond of our Lord Jesus Christ – or anything remotely related to Christianity.
“The display of this patently religious symbol on public property confers government endorsement of Christianity, a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause,” she wrote. “The cross has an exclusionary effect, making non-Christian and non-believing residents of Neosho political outsiders.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation has a notorious reputation for bullying small towns and communities. And most of those towns surrender because they don’t have the money to fight potential lawsuits.
But it just so happens that the out-of-town atheists picked the wrong folks to mess with.
“The cross is not going to go anywhere,” Mayor Ben Baker told me. “We are taking a stand. It’s the best thing to do and it’s the right thing to do.”
And the city council agrees with the mayor – voting unanimously to protect the cross.
“It is the unanimous opinion of the city council that the City of Neosho will not remove the cross or take any other actions which in any way compromises the long standing history of our city,” the city council said in a statement.
“It’s frustrating to us because you have an outside organization that makes these demands and stirs things up and they have no connection to the town,” Mayor Baker told me. “I haven’t had a single person from our community that has formally filed a complaint about the cross.”
As a matter of fact, the mayor said he’s been bombarded with telephone calls and messages and emails from residents offering to help fight the out-of-town atheists.
“The Freedom From Religion Foundation claims the cross is offensive and it endorses Christianity,” the mayor told me. “We say it’s been there since 1930 and it’s a historical part of our town and our heritage.”
I suspect the city council’s decision triggered micro-aggressions among atheists across the fruited plain. Put ‘em on your church prayer list, folks.
~~~~~~~~~
Well, it’s about time!! Huge kudos to the residents of Neosho for standing up to these troublemakers. For years, cities across America have caved in to the demands made by atheists, instead of telling them to take a hike as they should have.
It’s ironic that the atheists claim the cross makes non-believers feel like outsiders, when it’s been there for decades and hasn’t bothered anyone. That is until outsiders who are already non-believers showed up.
The question is this – if the atheists don’t believe in God, why does a Christian symbol bother them so much?
~Kathy
Categories: General
Pesky Truth 
I agree with Crawfish that the cross in the town of Neosho does not in any way conflict with the no-establishment-of-religion clause in the Constitution. This is a matter of a handful of outsiders attempting to impose their will upon the citizens of Neosho.
What I would like to point out, however, is that this is not so much an atheist crusade as it is a LEFTIST-atheist crusade. There are a lot of non-religious people in this country, the vast majority of which mind their own business and pretty much live and let live when it comes to religion. But if you look at the roster of individuals who make up the board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, it is a who’s who list consisting largely of academics, a group that is notorious for its leftwing ideology. The board includes Bernie Sanders supporter Ron Reagan; Richard Dawkins who, per Wikipedia: “…has stated that his political views are left-leaning.” Dawkins, a Brit, has voted with the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats; radical feminist Robin Morgan; Ernie Harburg, president of the Yip Harburg Foundation (per its website Yip Harburg “was known as ‘Broadway’s social conscience.’ … Yip was always dedicated to social justice. From 1951 to 1961 during the House Un-American Activities Committee investigations and the McCarthy hearings Yip was ‘blacklisted’ for his political views from film, television and radio.” In other words Yip was a communist sympathizer).
They may have joined forces for the purpose of driving religion out of the public realm but IMO it is their leftwing mindset that is the greater unifying force here, and the familiar pattern of bullying behavior fits right in with other leftwing organizations that attack all kinds of American traditions. The common thread is always a leftwing ideology.
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Good info you added there, CW, and absolutely there is a big leftist influence. It’s always about control with them, and what better venue to use than demanding Christian symbols be removed.
The cross is actually of less importance than the capacity to win by making demands and bullying people into compliance.
The thought of a communist sympathizer being the social conscience of Broadway is pretty creepy, is it not?
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The thought of a communist sympathizer being the social conscience of Broadway is pretty creepy, is it not?
Today it wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, and that’s a sad commentary to where we stand. The bio of Yip Harburg is fascinating. He was a lyricist who wrote “Brother Can You Spare a Dime” and all of the lyrics to the songs in The Wizard of Oz. He denied being a communist sympathizer but was a member of the Socialist Party and IMO that puts him on the path to being a communist sympathizer. When you look at Hollywood today and the incredible influence the Left exerts over the nation it shows how wise they were to try and diminish the influence of the communist. If only we had kept it up.
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True, CW. In today’s Hollywood, he’d blend right in. With all the liberal loons spouting off, he might even go unnoticed.
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“The display of this patently religious symbol on public property confers government endorsement of Christianity, a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause,” she wrote. “The cross has an exclusionary effect, making non-Christian and non-believing residents of Neosho political outsiders.”
Obviously, these morons have never read the “establishment clause”, which reads “congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…”
Is this town Congress? No.
Are they making a federal law? No.
Are they establishing an official national religion? No.
(By the way, a national religion would not be Christianity, but rather a specific denomination, such as the Roman Catholic Church, the Episcopal Church, the Lutheran Church, the Presbyterian Church, etc.)
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According to Wikipedia, the establishment clause does not prohibit the government’s entry into the religious domain to make accommodations for religious observances and practices in order to achieve the purposes of the Free Exercise Clause.
So the mayor, being part of the city government, was well within his authority to decide the cross stays. Looks like the atheists will have to look elsewhere for someone to intimidate.
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Would love to see the Freedom From Religion Foundation take on all the CHRISTIAN references in Washington, DC! They’d run out of money!
https://aclj.org/in-god-we-trust/complete-idiots-guide-religious-heritage
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Thanks for that link, tannngl, I hope everyone looks at it, because WOW what a list of things we have with Christian references! You’re right – they’d be out of money long before they finished with DC! One town has set an example that hopefully others will follow.
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