Michael McConnell & John Witte, Jr.:
The 1780 Massachusetts Declaration of Rights has religious-freedom protections older than the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Once tolerant of a localized establishment of town-based churches, it was amended in 1833 to bar establishment and instead to protect “all religious sects and denominations” from laws that deny equal protection or subordinate one religion to another.
It has never been interpreted to bar all religious symbols from public property. A statue of Moses is prominently displayed at the Worcester state courthouse, there has long been a statue of David at the State House, and Boston’s flag and seal proclaim in Latin “God be with us as he was with our fathers.” None of this has ever been challenged, let alone held unlawful.
But after the city of Quincy commissioned a highly regarded artist to sculpt two statues for the city’s police and fire building, a Superior Court judge ruled last year that they violated the state constitution and sent the statues to a warehouse, out of public view. The statues depict St. Florian and Archangel Michael, and thus purportedly endorse Catholicism, the judge claimed.