old Los Angeles County seal-----John Eastman-----new Los Angeles County seal

John Eastman is Professor of Law at Chapman University School of Law, specializing in Constitutional Law and Legal History. He is also the Director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy. He has a Ph.D. in Government from the Claremont Graduate School and a J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School.

Mr. Eastman is also the lead attorney for the plaintiff in Horowitz, et al. vs. County of Los Angeles, et al., a case now pending in which David Horowitz (and others) argue that the removal of the Latin cross from the seal of the County of Los Angeles, as voted by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors on September 14, 2004, by a 3-2 vote, constitutes both "hostility to Christianity" and "a waste of taxpayers' money."

To compare one photographic image of the actual Mission San Gabriel Arcangel with the one depicted on the new Los Angeles County seal, click here.

You can hear an interview with Mr. Eastman about this case, and about some related issues, by clicking here.

The "related issues" are mostly discussed in the first half of the interview, ending at around 17 minutes and 17 seconds into the clip. After that, it's more specifically about Horowitz, et al. vs. County of Los Angeles, et al..

In the course of this interview, Mr. Eastman refers to the theory of "intelligent design," which he suggests offers a non-evolutionary explanation of the origins of biological diversity. Interestingly, this is one of the alternatives to evolutionary theory put forward by Marjorie Rogers, a community activist in Cobb County, Georgia, who initiated a successful campaign there to put stickers in high school biology texts stating that evolution is "a theory, not a fact."

Controversy not unlike that surrounding the removal of the cross from the Los Angeles County seal is now swirling around this issue in Georgia.

The seal issue arose in Los Angeles when the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California threatened to sue Los Angeles County if it didn't remove the cross from its seal. The ACLU of Georgia is suing to remove the "evolution-is-a-theory-not-a-fact" stickers from biology textbooks in Georgia.

So at the same time that California took its first step towards spending the $3 billion authorized by Proposition 71 to push the limits of bio-medical science forward in the area of stem cell research, an investigatory effort designed to uncover life's most intimate secrets and a project that could put the future of humanity in the hands of scientists in and around Stanford University, citizens in Georgia are battling each other about whether the theory of evolution, which underlies this new research and all of modern biological and medical science, is even a fact.

It's hard to believe that California and Georgia are even on the same planet, let alone the same country. But, as discussed in "California Politics Today #177: Red and Blue, right and left, unite, agreeing that the United States ought to be dismantled along geo-ideological lines, in a grand "excession" (EXpulsion/seCESSION)", they might not be for long.