If you can’t beat ’em, ridicule ’em. That sums up the sentiment informing a perverse move by liberals in Minnesota.
At issue is a modest monument to Americans who died in battle for their country that that was added last summer to a veterans memorial park in the city of Belle Plaine. The sculpture, called “Joe,” consists of a 2-foot-high likeness of a soldier kneeling at a grave marked by a simple cross.
According to Minneapolis CBS affiliate WCCO, the cross was removed from the display in January following objections from the atheist watchdog group Freedom from Religion Foundation, which had argued that the cross violated the so-called establishment clause of the Constitution.
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But a month later, the city council voted to restore the cross. Designating the area of the park that housed the sculpture a “limited public forum,” the vote allowed any display, religious or secular, provided it honored veterans.
So did that resolve the matter? Not by a long shot. Opponents responded by resolving to erect a “monument” of their own. They have invited the Satanic Temple located in Salem, Mass., to install a black cube inscribed with inverted pentagrams and crowned by an upturned helmet. An artist’s rendering follows.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune quotes Doug Mesner, founder of the Temple’s nonprofit fundraising arm, as explaining that his group “does not worship Satan, but instead aims to ‘encourage reason and empathy, reject tyrannical authority and promote justice’ while seeking equity for nonbelievers.”
The whole affair reeks of revenge and invites skepticism. It seems obvious that the atheists in Minnesota are so determined to even the score that they have invited members of a bizarre sect 1,400 miles away to desecrate what should be hallowed ground.
A pox on all of them!
