Noah Feldman, Columnist

Free Speech Can Get Awkward, a Small Town Discovers

Belle Plaine, Minnesota, wanted a Christian memorial in a town park. Now it's getting a Satanic one too.

May 9, 2017 at 6:55 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Coming soon: A Satanic memorial, too.
Source: Freedom From Religion Foundation

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Pity the poor residents of Belle Plaine, Minnesota. 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.