In every city across America, public parks are a source of community pride. They are where people of all backgrounds come together peacefully for rest and recreation, for fellowship and friendship, for sport and play, and for other community-building activities that bind a city’s people together.
In my city of Pensacola, where I serve as mayor, we have 93 of those parks, places for our community to gather and places where our long and rich history is on display.
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One of those places is Bayview Park. It’s a gathering place that means a lot of different things for different people. I ride my bike through it every day. On any given day at Bayview I see mothers pushing strollers, fathers and sons loading fishing boats at the dock, seniors lunching at its senior center, teens playing tennis, children on a playground, professionals eating lunch on a bench, a guitarist strumming chords in the amphitheater. There you will find vibrant, peaceful community on full display.
You will also find a cross.
For 75 years, the Bayview cross has stood silently in a quiet corner of the park. The cross was donated by local members of the Jaycees — a nonprofit national civic organization that counts among its members Bill Clinton, Larry Bird, and the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger — to unite Pensacola, a military town, on the eve of World War II.
While a cross is certainly a religious symbol, the Bayview cross is so much more. It’s become a community gathering place, an integral part of my town’s fabric, a symbol to our local citizens — religious and non-religious — of our proud history of coming together during hard times.
A lawsuit now threatens to have the cross removed. A group called the American Humanist Association has sued the city demanding that the cross be torn down, arguing that the cross is somehow an offense to the eyes and an affront to the Constitution.
Groups like AHA roam the country looking to topple beloved memorials that have any connection to religion. They sued to remove crosses placed as highway memorials to policemen killed in the line of duty in Utah. They have a conniption every year over the centuries-old American tradition of public crèches and menorahs at the holidays. They forced the state of California to place wooden boards over a cross in the Mojave Desert erected to honor the fallen heroes of World War I. They sued a town over a decades-old beloved statue of Jesus also erected to honor veterans.
Perhaps most egregiously, one such group fought for years to prevent the cross-shaped metal beams
They want references to God out of the pledge, off our coinage, and off our courtroom walls. They are on a search-and-destroy mission to wipe out any reference of religion from the public square — even when most of those references have taken on a secular purpose that serve as a symbol of civic unity and are often meant to honor those who have bravely sacrificed their lives for our freedoms.
Now they’ve brought the fight to my city, and I won’t back down. Our lawyers at Becket, a nonprofit law firm that defends people of all faiths, have defended the rights of my people to keep standing a part of our heritage that brings us pride and unity, one that represents our patriotism and commitment to peace in a broken world. They’ve taken that battle all the way to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, where we await a decision over our right to remember our community’s history.
The AHA may call themselves “humanists,” but fighting to tear down a beloved town cross is anything but humanist. Because to remove the Bayview cross would be more than taking down two concrete beams. It would be to take down a visual emblem of the very thing that makes my city of Pensacola strong and proud, one that symbolizes our city’s commitment to handle adversity by coming together in peace.
The American Humanists have no right to censor the cultural and religious heritage of my town, most especially our memory of the brave men and women who have died fighting for America. And they have no right calling themselves humanists when their mission is little more than rooting out the cherished symbols of a community spirit that brings out the best of our humanity.
Ashton Hayward is mayor of Pensacola, Florida.
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