Pity the poor residents of Belle Plaine. They're about to get a veterans memorial with satanic symbols in their public park — and it's their own fault.
They allowed a Christian memorial earlier this year, opening the park to all memorials in order to avoid violating the constitutional prohibition against establishment of religion. Now they have to allow the satanic memorial as a matter of free speech. Whipsawed between two different clauses of the First Amendment, they probably don't know what hit them.
To understand what's happening in Belle Plaine and why it makes legal sense — if no other kind — you need to start with the complex, judge-made rules about what happens when religion and free speech interact.
Sometime last year, the Belle Plaine Veterans Club paid for and installed a new monument for Veterans Memorial Park in the town 45 miles southwest of Minneapolis. Close to a granite memorial inscribed with the names of the town's war dead, the new memorial depicted in silhouette a soldier kneeling with a rifle in front of a cross that is roughly the size of a tombstone in a military cemetery.
The Freedom From Religion Foundation objected, arguing that the new memorial was an endorsement of Christianity in violation of the establishment clause of the First Amendment.
In my view, it wasn't at all certain that the memorial was unconstitutional. Yes, it includes a religious symbol, and it's certainly possible that a court would have found that, in context, it amounted to a preference for religion over nonreligion.
But it also would have been possible for a court to interpret the memorial as depicting a soldier kneeling before a grave that was marked by a cross, not before the cross in a religious sense. Anyone who's been to military cemeteries like those in France or Italy knows how moving the fields of crosses can be.
Such a memorial might not register as an endorsement of religion, and would be constitutionally permitted. But Belle Plaine, which had a population of just 6,661 in the last census, didn't want to go through costly litigation. So it removed the memorial.