Massachusetts’ highest court just handed the ACLU a powerful new tool for scrubbing religious references from public life, and it did so by inventing an injury nobody has suffered.
The Supreme Judicial Court blocked Quincy, Massachusetts, from installing two bronze statues of St. Michael the Archangel and St. Florian outside its new public safety building, not because the city coerced anyone into worship, funded a church, or discriminated against a resident, but because the statues are new, large, and “closely affiliated with a particular religion.” That’s the entire violation: bronze that might make someone think of Catholicism. If that reasoning survives, it won’t stop at two statues in Quincy.
