The Satanic Temple, in the front lines against the intrusion of Christian dogmatic beliefs into public life, has won a skirmish in the fight to defend women’s rights when they challenged the state of Missouri after they passed a law that forced women seeking abortions to listen to an ultrasound. The Temple was suing the state on behalf of a member of the Temple.
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Thanks to commenter Timothy, I saw the video below of what happened at the meeting of the Pensacola city council in Florida when a Satanist gave the opening invocation, taking advantage of the US Supreme Court ruling that if government agencies are going to allow ceremonial opening prayers, then they cannot favor or discriminate against any single group. (You may have to turn on the sound by clicking the icon at the bottom right.)
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Following the US Supreme Court’s 2014 ruling in the case Greece v. Galloway that ceremonial opening prayers were permissible at meetings of local government bodies provided that there was no consistent pattern of discrimination in favor of or against one sect, a Satanist will be giving the invocation at tomorrow’s meeting of the Grand Junction City Council meeting in Colorado.
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Usually what we see in the news are stories about how local communities are riddled with superstitions and oppose efforts to combat popular form of it. Hence I was intrigued by this story about the opposition to a woman who wanted to teach a course on astrology in the town of Canyonville, Oregon. It turns out that there is a local ordinance dating back to 1982 that “prohibits fortunetelling, astrology, phrenology, palmistry, clairvoyance, mesmerism and spiritualism”.
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I wrote recently about the setback suffered by a prisoner who said that he was a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and wanted religious privileges that corresponded to those given to members of other religions. The judge denied the request, saying that the record was clear that the Church of the FSM was intended all along as a parody.
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In a post a few days ago, I wrote about how The Satanic Temple had applied to deliver the opening prayer at a meeting of the Phoenix, AZ city council. The council had been having opening prayers for over sixty years but the 2014 Greece v Galloway decision by the US Supreme Court had required government entities that offered such prayers to open it up to all groups and thus avoid the appearance of endorsing specific viewpoints.
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The US Supreme Court decision in Greece v. Galloway was a bit confused but seemed to suggest that it was acceptable for government entities to open their meetings with a prayer as long as the opportunity for offering prayers was made without discriminatory intent And not limited to just those views that promoted one particular viewpoint.
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There are those in the US who want to privilege Christianity in American public life by demanding the right to have prayers and Bible readings in schools and at public governmental functions, and by erecting Christian religious symbols and monuments such as the Ten Commandments tablets and crosses and paintings in public spaces.
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It turns out that despite repeated defeats in the courts, Oklahoma has still not removed the Ten Commandments from the grounds of its capital building. The appeal by the state’s governor Mary Fallin to the state Supreme Court was rejected on July 27. Fallin then said that she had not received a direct order (from her god perhaps?) to remove the statue, clearly a stalling tactic to avoid taking any action.
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On Monday, the Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected an attempt by Mary Fallin, the Republican governor of the state, to reconsider its earlier ruling that the presence of the Ten Commandments monument on the capital grounds violated the state constitution and had to be removed, with the chief justice John Reif writing, “We carefully consider the arguments of the commission and find no merit warranting a grant of rehearing.”
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