A Massachusetts city in the Greater Boston area commissioned a pair of 10-foot-tall bronze statues heavy with cultural and historical significance to honor police and firefighters outside its new public safety headquarters.
The statues also carry religious symbolism — one depicts the winged archangel Michael stepping on the head of a demon, and the other depicts Florian, a third-century firefighting Roman Christian — prompting the American Civil Liberties Union and a handful of secularizing activist groups to join local thin-skinned critics in suing the city last May to block their installation.
According to the ACLU, having these statues as the sole adornments on the building’s facade “would undermine religious pluralism in Quincy and violate the Massachusetts Constitution’s long-standing requirement that the government remain neutral in matters of religion.”
The legal battle has reached the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which heard oral arguments this week in the case Fitzmaurice v. City of Quincy.
The court has indicated that its decision might leave secularizing iconoclasts disappointed later this year.
