Over at First Things, Meghan Duke writes about going to the National Gallery of Art* after attending the March for Life. She was wearing a lime-green lapel pin that had a website address and showed a small hand inside a larger hand. Then she went through security:

After searching my bag, the two guards at the Gallery told me, “You’re good to go in, but first you need to remove that pro-life pin.” … The pin, they informed me, was a “religious symbol” and a symbol of a particular political cause and it could not be worn inside a federal building. Why, I asked, can I not wear a religious or political symbol inside a federal building? Bringing to bear the full weight of the supreme law of the land, the guards informed that it was a violation of the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution: The combination of me, wearing a pro-life pin, in a federal building was a violation of the separation of church and state.

A spokesperson for the Gallery* later said the museum has no policy against lapel pins, that the guards acted on their own and that they would be censured. Read the rest of Meghan’s story here.

*The museum was the National Gallery of Art, not the Smithsonian as earlier written.