A Christian flag shouldn’t roil Boston City Hall

Shed a tear for the sadness that’s surely felt throughout Boston, now that applications are no longer being accepted for flag-raising ceremonies in City Hall Plaza.

The shutdown was adopted in anticipation of last week’s unanimous and entirely predictable Supreme Court ruling that the city cannot refuse to fly a flag commemorating “the civic and social contributions of the Christian community” on a pole where in recent years it has allowed so many others.

Nobody thinks the shutdown is permanent, and there’s concern aplenty about what happens when the plaza is reopened to celebrations.

The Satanic Temple, according to news reports, hopes to be first in line.

Let’s be clear: The justices didn’t rule that every municipality must fly the flag of any organization that asks.

They ruled that because Boston over the past decade or so had approved all 284 applications to hold celebrations in the plaza and raise some 50 flags, the First Amendment prohibited the city from discriminating among applicants on the basis of viewpoint. In free speech terms, Boston’s actions converted the plaza into an open forum.

A forum, in this case, for flags. We fight over flags because they’re speech.

They convey messages. Concern over those messages explains why opposition to the display of Confederate battle flags is so vehement. (A ban was first proposed by Union war veterans over a century ago.)

Agreement with the message explains why so many people admired the cleverness of activists who last month projected a giant image of the Ukrainian flag onto the Russian embassy in Washington, D.C.

For those who endorse the particular message, disrespecting a flag is no trivial offense.

Any objection to the symbol is seen as objection to the message itself.

That sense that the integrity of the message is at stake explains, for instance, the sharp criticism of Exxon Mobil over its recent decision to prohibit the flying of Black Lives Matter or LGBTQ Pride flags outside corporate offices. That same sense explains why half of adults surveyed support a constitutional amendment banning flag desecration.

Which brings us to the question of hoisting the Russian flag in the plaza in the midst of the murderous aggression in Ukraine. Is the First Amendment also Vladimir Putin’s friend?

Maybe so. In 1931, the justices ruled that California could not punish a woman who ran a children’s camp where each morning began with the hoisting of a “reproduction of the flag of Soviet Russia.” Nevertheless, on June 14, 1962 — Flag Day! — two students at the University of Pennsylvania were arrested for breach of the peace after they displayed what one newspaper called “a hammerand-sickle Soviet flag” in their apartment window. (An hour after the arrest, a sign reading “Down with capitalist cops” appeared there.)

Those arrests plainly violated the First Amendment, which contains no exception for speech that’s offensive or distasteful or outside the mainstream.

However, even if individuals can engage in whatever speech they like, can they force Boston to hoist their flags?

Even flags symbolizing causes the public hates?

If the plaza in front of City Hall is open to all comers, the answer is yes. As long as the speech itself would be protected, the city must treat the most unpopular applicants just as they would anyone else.

That would include applicants who wants to support Russia and its dictator.

But we won’t face that case until Boston reopens the application process, which is unlikely to happen until the municipal government can come up with a set of rules limiting who gets to celebrate what in City Hall Plaza. Will the new rules also violate the First Amendment?

As soon as an application is denied and a lawsuit is filed, we’ll find out.