Plaintiffs seek to banish religious symbols using the Lemon test, which the U.S. Supreme Court ‘long ago abandoned.’

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.