Sometimes it’s hard to be accommodating. Tolerance can only be stretched so far, especially when someone is determined to stretch it past the breaking point. And so it is that the Belle Plaine City Council is likely to take away the public forum area at its Veterans Memorial Park.

The area had become a battleground between those who favor allowing religious symbolism in public spaces, and those who would do anything to prevent it.

At issue is “Joe,” two-foot tall, homemade statue, a silhouette of a soldier kneeling by a cross, which had been placed next to the city’s war veterans memorial in the park. In January the city ordered the statue removed for fear someone would file a lawsuit demanding separation of church and state. Enough people protested the removal that the city council designated a free speech area, where memorials from any religion could be placed. Joe went back up, but the Satanic Temple of Salem, Mass., announced its plans to put a satanic memorial up at the park, not because they really worship Satan, they say, but to get equal treatment for atheists and non-believers.

This weekend the family that created the “Joe” sculpture took it back down just before a Christian rally against the satanic memorial plans. And Monday, the Belle Plaine Council was planning to rescind its free speech area resolution.

That’s the problem with free speech. It applies to everyone, even those who disagree with you. It allows you to express your Christian beliefs, but it also allows those who hold to other beliefs to express theirs. This can run afoul of the fairly new right Americans seem to have adopted, the right not to be offended. Atheists and non-believers apparently take offense at the sight of a cross, so they retaliate with a monument containing a pentagram to offend Christians.

It is an all-or-nothing situation that, sadly, will result in “nothing” in the Belle Plaine Veterans Memorial Park.