I think we can argue about whether or not a cross as a war memorial on public land is appropriate or constitutional – an issue which the Supreme Court is wrestling with right now. But I don’t see how anyone except for individuals or groups with an active hatred of Christianity can object to this one that is causing a dispute in a different part of California.

Before Monterey replaces the Portol -Crespi cross on Del Monte Beach, it wants to raise a war chest to defend the city's action against possible lawsuits — a move an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer calls "a very bizarre decision."

After holding a public hearing on the cross issue Tuesday night, the council came out of closed session saying its members were unanimous in wanting the cross replaced. The council said it marks the historic site where explorer Don Gaspar de Portol and Father Juan Crespi raised a wooden cross in December 1769 as a signal to the supply ship San Jose, expected to arrive from Mexico.

The newer cross, erected on the dunes between Roberts Lake and the beach in December 1969, was set there to mark the bicentennial of that event. Sometime during the night of Sept. 18, vandals sawed the cross off at its base and left it lying in the sand.

The council motion seems to hedge the city's bets in restoring it. It states: "The City Council does not condone vandalism. Because of the historical significance of the cross, it is the City Council's desire to restore the cross. To that end, once a legal defense fund is established by the community and $50,000 is raised, we will proceed with the restoration of the cross."

Got that, folks? This cross was placed on the site for one very simple reason – to the early exploration of the area by Spanish explorers who erected a cross on the site. This would seem to be, from a First Amendment perspective, a no-brainer. There is nothing religious about this cross – it is unquestionably the recreation of a historical event, which makes its erection a bona fide secular act.

But that isn’t good enough for the ACLU cretins who want to keep the cross from going back up. Seems to me that they simply wish to expunge the symbol from public land even when it serves a valid secular purpose – and that they probably won’t be happy until they have banned the letter “t” and the plus sign from all public facilities.

Posted by: Greg at 11:04 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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One of the most troubling questions arising from the Holocaust is that of why the Jews did not resist more. That is not intended as an attempt to blame the victim, but more a desire to understand how so many people could fail to act in an effort to save their own lives and those of their children in the face of so great an evil.

But it is to be eternally remembered that some Jews did stand and fight – in particular the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. And last week the world lost the last surviving leader of that heroic uprising against the murderous Nazi thugs.

Marek Edelman, who died on October 2, probably aged 90, was the last surviving leader of the armed Jewish revolt against the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto; having commanded the heroic but doomed struggle in April 1943 he was one of a tiny number of fighters to escape with his life, eventually taking part in the equally ill-fated citywide Uprising the following year.

Edelman was just 20 when the Nazis invaded Warsaw. By November 1940 the invading army had cut off his district from the rest of the city with walls and wire. As the anti-Semitic directives of the occupation were put into force, hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews were forced into the ghetto, inflating its population to almost half a million.

Conditions became intolerable and in the course of 1941 the ghetto population was decimated by disease and malnutrition. Early the following year however, with Hitler's decision to implement the Endlösung, or final solution to "the Jewish question", plans were put in place to liquidate the ghetto and its remaining occupants entirely.

From July 1942, Jews were herded through the ghetto to an umschlagplatz (or departure point), a square at its southern end, and on to trains 6,000 at a time. From there, the destinations were death camps. Two months after the ghetto clearance had begun, more than 300,000 Jews had been transported to the gas chambers. But even as Jews were encouraged on to the trains to Treblinka with promises of better conditions at their destination, Edelman and a small band of others were laying down plans for armed resistance.

And resist they did, fighting for three heroic weeks in 1943 against the Nazis who came to exterminate them Some escaped, while those who remained behind died in a last ditch resistance against the great evil of the age.

And Edelman provided a perspective on the question raised at the beginning of the post that to me is quite profound.

After the war, the 20 days of fighting in the ghetto were sometimes described as a rare example of violent Jewish resistance to the horrors inflicted on them by the Nazis. But Edelman always refused to make any distinction of character between those in the ghetto who fought and those who boarded the trains to the camps. Both groups, he said, were simply dealing with an inevitable death in the best way they could.

"We knew perfectly well that we had no chance of winning," he recalled. "We fought simply not to allow the Germans alone to pick the time and place of our deaths. We knew we were going to die. Just like all the others who were sent to Treblinka." Indeed, Edelman added, far from going passively, those who went steadfastly to Treblinika had shown the ultimate courage. "Their death was far more heroic. We didn't know when we would take a bullet. They had to deal with certain death, stripped naked in a gas chamber or standing at the edge of a mass grave waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. It is an awesome thing, when one is going so quietly to one's death. It was easier to die fighting than in a gas chamber."

It is a perspective that I had never considered before reading this brave man’s obituary. I do not know that I agree with it. Still, I honor it as I honor the man who so many years ago led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – and I am sure that his entry into the presence of God was one which saw him greatly honored as well.

Posted by: Greg at 09:51 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Once again, we have an amazing anthropological find out of Ethiopia that sheds light – and raises questions – about the evolution of our species and our primate cousins.

After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.
The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.
After 15 years of rumors, researchers in the U.S. and Ethiopia on Thursday made public fossils from a 4.4-million-year-old human forebearer they say reveals that our earliest ancestors were more modern than scholars assumed and deepens the evolutionary gulf separating humankind from today's apes and chimpanzees.
The highlight of the extensive fossil trove is a female skeleton a million years older than the iconic bones of Lucy, the primitive female figure that has long symbolized humankind's beginnings.

The potentially earthshaking aspect of this discovery is that anthropologists may have had it all wrong in thinking that humans evolved away from our earliest prehuman ancestors while chimps, monkeys and apes remain closer to our common ancestors. It appears that we may be more faithful to that common ancestor and the primates are the ones that spun of on an evolutionary tangent. I can’t wait to learn more – because I’ll be teaching this in my classes in the future.

Posted by: Greg at 01:05 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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