Forty-seven years after the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted a county seal, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California is threatening to sue on the grounds that the seal, which contains a cross, is an “impermissible endorsement of Christianity.” This will no doubt come as news to the millions of non-Christians who have lived and prospered peacefully in Los Angeles over the past 47 years.

A current Los Angeles County supervisor, Mike Antonovich, says the cross in the seal represents the founding of Los Angeles as a Catholic mission. “It does not mean that we are all Roman Catholic or that everyone who resides in our County is a Christian — it only reflects our historical roots,” he said. Mr. Antonovich also points out that the very name Los Angeles — “the angels” — has a religious meaning and that pictured prominently on the county seal along with the cross is Pomona, the mythical Roman goddess of fruit.”Regarding a pagan goddess on the County’s seal, the ACLU’s silence is deafening,” Mr. Antonovich said.

Realizing that what starts in California often makes its way to the East Coast, we had a look at the New York City seal. It turns out to contain a windmill shaped like what we imagine the ACLU could construe as a cross. And it features a sailor, Dexter, holding what the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services describes as a “cross-staff.” The flag of the borough of Queens has its own cross, atop a crown symbolizing that of Queen Catherine of Braganza, for whom the borough is named; the Queens borough president’s spokesman says he knows of no complaints yet.

Meanwhile, our Jacob Gershman reported on March 17 that Columbia University had replaced the crosses on its symbolic crown with more secular-looking diamonds. The constitutional challenge before the Supreme Court on the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance — another case that started on the Coast — is also front-page news.

We don’t much care what’s in the Los Angeles County seal, and even the New York City seal isn’t something we spend much time worrying about. The ACLU’s move, however, represents two trends that are troubling.

The first is the effort to strip from public life all references to religion, no matter how innocuous they are and no matter how clearly they fall short of what the framers of the First Amendment intended when they prohibited the establishment of a state religion.

The second is the resort to the courts instead of to legislative redress. If the ACLU wanted to launch a lobbying campaign to get the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to vote to change the seal, that would be one thing. But to threaten to rush into court to get the seal struck down as illegal is its own form of intolerance. The most encouraging thing about Columbia’s decision is that it appears to have been done of the university’s own volition and not as the result of any legal threat. There are times when an injustice is so grave that it merits court intervention rather than waiting for a legislative remedy. But a cross that has for 47 years accompanied the goddess Pomona on a county seal that also includes oil derricks, a tuna, and a championship cow — who is identified on the county Web site as Pearlette, a symbol of the dairy industry — strikes us as infertile terrain for a constitutional legal battle.

If a 47-year-old county seal is high enough on the civil liberties agenda that the ACLU is making it a priority, it’s enough to call into question the group’s claim that civil liberties in America are suffering an unprecedented assault as part of the war on terrorism. Surely if there were a genuine threat to civil liberties at hand, the ACLU wouldn’t be piddling around with the cross that accompanies Pomona the fruit goddess and Pearlette the championship cow.