Satanic Temple
trolls?
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// Mark Meckler Says The Person Who Delivered a Satanic Invocation Should Have Been Tarred & Feathered
10/13/2026
Earlier this month, a representative of the Satanic Temple of Iowa delivered the invocation before a meeting of the Ottumwa City Council. Predictably, the speech set off a wave of controversy as Christian nationalists voiced their outrage.
Among those voicing such outrage is Christian nationalist political activist and right-wing commentator Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States Foundation, who used the most recent episode of his "The BattleCry" program to declare that, had he been in the room when the invocation was delivered, he "might have got arrested for assault."
"The city council meeting was opened with a straight up prayer to Satan," Meckler griped. "No one objected. No one intervened. After the fact, somebody said that we should have a moment of silence. Somebody stood up afterwards and said, 'We should absolutely pray against this. We need to overrule this immediately.'"
"I don't know about you, but if I was there and I heard this going on, I'd have jumped [up]," he continued. "I might have tackled the guy, I might have got arrested for assault. I would have started shouting. I would have interrupted the guy. No way, no how. This should not be allowed."
"This is not protected by the First Amendment," Meckler insisted. "This guy ... is a professed Satanist, but he says it's not a religion. He says they don't worship Satan in the traditional sense like worshiping God. They don't fit the definition of a religion. We should absolutely prohibit this type of opening at city council meetings. Anybody who thinks that the framers of the Constitution or the founders of this country would have tolerated this kind of stuff, that when they came up with the First Amendment, they thought, 'It's gonna be great because we're gonna have a bunch of Satan worshipers rising up doing this stuff,' they don't understand the state of the country at that time. There were actually laws against this in all the colonies. All these colonies said this kind of stuff was illegal. It wasn't just that they were opposed to it, they made it illegal and we should not tolerate this in our country."
"We should not allow Satanists to get a toehold at our city council meetings or Congress or anywhere else," Meckler declared. "So if you see this—you, I'm talking to you—you should do something. You should object to it. You should start yelling. Yeah, you should heckle him until he is shut up. This should not be allowed in our seats of government."
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Kansas satanists to defy governor with ‘therapeutic blasphemy’ in black mass at Statehouse
TOPEKA — All hail civil disobedience.
Gov. Laura Kelly intervened Wednesday in satanists’ plans to conduct a black mass on March 28 at the Statehouse by declaring they would not be allowed inside.
The satanists plan to defy her undivine wisdom.
“We will be showing up on the 28th,” said Michael Stewart, founder and president of the Satanic Grotto, which organized the event. “We will be entering the building and attempting to perform the mass, and if Capitol Police want to stop us, they will need to arrest us.”
The Satanic Grotto’s plans to conduct a black mass in the Statehouse rotunda stimulated considerable attention online — and outrage from the Catholic Church.
In cheeky social media posts, Stewart describes satanists as “the scariest thing in the dark.”
But in an interview, he said he was planning a safe event, with nothing to be afraid of. His said his group has about three dozen members, primarily from Kansas City and Wichita, and is nonviolent.
“The black mass is a satanic version of the Catholic mass, meant to reflect our own pain and anger of us being subjected to religion that we never gave consent to,” Stewart said. “It was imposed upon us. So the ritual is sort of — you can think of it as therapeutic blasphemy.”
The group describes itself on its website as an independent and nondenominational church whose members are feminist, LBGTQ+ allies, and anti-racist — “Nazi Satanists can f---- off.”
The Satanic Grotto’s event listing on Facebook shows 26 plan to attend and 116 are interested in the event.
Chuck Weber, of Kansas Catholic Conference, said in a March 6 statement that such an “explicit demonstration of anti-Catholic bigotry will be an insult to not only Catholics, but all people of good will.”
“The Catholic Bishops of Kansas ask that first and foremost, we pray for the conversion of those taking part in this event, as well as each person’s own conversion of heart during this scared Season of Lent,” Weber said in the statement.
The governor entered the arena Wednesday, when she issued a statement declaring her concerns about the event. She said there are “more constructive ways to protest and express disagreements without insulting or denigrating sacred religious symbols.”
She acknowledged the right to freedom of speech and expression — “regardless of how offensive or distasteful I might find the content to be” — and that she has limited authority to respond to the planned event.
“That said, it is important to keep the Statehouse open and accessible to the public while ensuring all necessary health and safety regulations are enforced,” Kelly said in her statement. “Therefore, all events planned for March 28 will be moved outdoors to the grounds surrounding the Statehouse. Again, no protests will be allowed inside the Statehouse on March 28.”
Stewart said the governor’s office didn’t call him before issuing the public statement.
“This is a Democrat governor bowing to religious and Republican pressure,” Stewart said. “There was enough outrage that she had to do something, but she’s so chicken to actually stand up for anything, the best she could do was try to shuffle us outside and make it look like she has done something to save her own hide instead of standing up for religious and free speech.”
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
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Shortly before Christmas, a fanatical Christian nationalist activist named Michael Cassidy drove from Mississippi to the state capitol in Iowa and proceeded to destroy a display that had been erected there by the Satanic Temple of Iowa, as protected by the First Amendment. Cassidy’s actions were loudly praised by fellow right-wing political activists and candidates and a legal defense fund set up for him has so far raised nearly $90,000.
On Wednesday, Cassidy appeared on “The Stew Peters Show” to defend himself, claiming that when he saw the Satanic display, he was overcome with “righteous indignation” that something “so offensive” and “so anti-Christian” was allowed to be on display in a state capitol and he therefore took it upon himself to destroy it.
Peters, a far-right virulently anti-LGBTQ bigot who regularly uses his nightly program, speeches, and social media accounts to promote white nationalists and antisemites and to spread wild conspiracy theories, bigotry, and calls for violence, completely understood.
Cassidy’s actions were completely justified, Peters asserted, because Satanists have no right to mock Christians.
“Righteous indignation is exactly right, and rightfully so,” Peters declared. “This is Satan mocking us. By putting this Baphomet [statue] inside of the Iowa capitol building in Des Moines, that is mockery! That is Satanists and Satan’s minions mocking Christians, mocking Christianity, mocking the very value system that this country was founded on that they then turn around and use as their justification that, ‘We have the right to do this.’ No, you don’t! No, you don’t.”
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https://www.alternet.org/how-after-school-clubs-became-a-new-battleground-in-the-satanic-temples-push-to-preserve-separation-of-church-and-state/
https://www.alternet.org/alternet-exclusives/satanic-temple-defeat-white-saviorism/
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/1/2150599/-Satanic-Temple-opens-telehealth-abortion-clinic-and-names-it-after-Samuel-Alito-s-mom
not new but notable persist?
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a Michigan Republican spoke to a QAnon podcast just after the 2020 election where she made some bizarre comments about Democrats, Vice News found.
Kristina Karamo, who is seen as an extremist in the race to control elections as the Michigan Secretary of State, talked about "child sacrifice" by the Democratic Party.
“If you go to the Satanic temple website, they have an entire five-minute video explaining why abortion is a religious ritual,” she said interview. “They literally say that it is a sacrifice, it is a religious ritual for them to have an abortion, it is sick. And as you mentioned, the baby body parts… they sell the organs.There’s a ton of money involved in freshly harvested organs. There’s so much evidence out there.”
Organs aren't fully formed during an abortion and wouldn't help anyone, but that logic escaped Karamo, who described it as a kind of church service happening on Satanic altars instead of in medical clinics. The belief is consistent with one of the main QAnon conspiracies and the concept of drinking the blood of the young was a key piece of the PizzaGate conspiracy theory, in which the right claims Democrats are keeping children in basements to drink their blood. A gunman showed up at the local neighborhood pizza parlor known for being a fun place for families as a result of the lies.
In another appearance with the podcast, Karamo claimed that the Jan. 6 attack on Congress in 2021 was "Antifa posing as Trump supporters." It was a conspiracy theory that Republicans tried to spin during the attack, but there was too much evidence to the contrary.
Karamo became known when she claimed she saw election fraud in 2020 while acting as a poll challenger in Detroit.Her statement was part of a challenge to the 2020 election that was thrown out by the Supreme Court. It wasn't long after she became a leading GOP candidate for the Michigan race.
She faces off against Democratic incumbent Jocelyn Benson.
Read the full report at Vice News.
luciferian www site?]
https://theconversation.com/how-the-satanic-temple-is-using-abortion-rituals-to-claim-religious-liberty-against-the-texas-heartbeat-bill-167755
texas’s controversial anti-abortion law known as the “Heartbeat Bill” went into effect at midnight on Sept. 1, 2021. Less than 24 hours later, the U.S. Supreme Court declared it would not block the law.
In response, The Satanic Temple, a nontheistic group that has been recognized by the IRS as a religion, announced that it would fight back by invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or RFRA, to demand exemption from abortion restrictions on religious grounds. RFRA laws, which came into effect in 1993, restrict the government’s ability to burden religious practices.
Like the Heartbeat Bill itself, The Satanic Temple’s efforts to circumvent abortion restrictions on religious grounds involve a creative and complicated legal strategy. As a scholar who studies the ways in which The Satanic Temple’s provocations affect public debates about religious freedom, I anticipate their latest legal argument will challenge some assumptions about RFRA and the freedoms it was designed to protect.
The Heartbeat Bill
In the pivotal 1973 abortion case Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, the Supreme Court established that abortion is a Constitutional right. However, states can still pass laws that severely restrict access to abortion. The question is how severely.
Texas’s new law was designed to effectively shut down all abortion while protecting the state from judicial review.
First, the bill bans abortion after six weeks – the point at which Texas lawmakers claim a fetus’s heartbeat can be detected. Most women are not aware they are pregnant before six weeks, and Texas abortion providers estimate 85% of abortions in the state are performed after this period.
Second, the law allows anyone to sue those they can accuse of “aiding and abetting” an abortion for US$10,000. Critics of the law claim this is an intimidation tactic designed to threaten the clinics with so much potential liability that legal abortion becomes impossible.
But outsourcing enforcement to the public is also intended to protect the state. Proponents of the bill claim that since no state official is enforcing the law, abortion providers have no one to sue.
The Religious Freedom Restoration Act
The 1990 Supreme Court case Employment Division v. Smith considered arguments that a member of the Native American Church had a religious right to use peyote, a controlled substance.
The court ruled that freedom of religion was no excuse from compliance with a generally applicable law – a law that applies equally to everyone and does not single out specific groups. With this decision, it appeared that the free exercise of religion guaranteed in the First Amendment meant very little.
In response, Congress wrote the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which was signed into law in 1993.
Under RFRA, the government cannot burden the free exercise of religion unless: 1) it has a compelling reason for doing so, and 2) the government acts in the least restrictive way possible to achieve its purpose.
Four years later, in Boerne v. Flores, the Supreme Court ruled that RFRA applied only to the federal government and not to individual states. So many states, including Texas, passed similar legislation, sometimes called “mini-RFRAs.”
In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby that under RFRA, the federal government could not require the Christian company Hobby Lobby to fund insurance that provided their employees with certain forms of birth control. This decision inspired The Satanic Temple by linking the question of religious liberty with that of reproductive rights.
The Satanic Temple and RFRa
[nice statue pix kid throne 2 fingers]
Satanic Temple’s seven tenets include the belief that one’s body is subject to one’s own will alone.
The Satanic Temple began in 2013 and has launched a number of political actions and lawsuits related to the separation of church and state. Texas is home to four congregations of The Satanic Temple, more than any other state.
Although The Satanic Temple does not believe in or worship a literal Satan, they revere Satan as described in the works of English poet John Milton and the Romantic movement, an intellectual movement that originated in late 18th-century Europe, as a powerful symbol of rebellion against authority.
The Satanic Temple’s seven tenets include the belief that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” It interprets state restrictions on abortion access as a burden on this sincerely held religious belief.
In 2015, The Satanic Temple began a series of lawsuits against the state of Missouri, where women seeking abortions must view sonograms and then review a booklet stating, “The life of each human being begins at conception. Abortion will terminate the life of a separate, unique, living human being.” After this, the women must spend 72 hours considering their decision before finally receiving an abortion.
The Satanic Temple argued that this practice was an unconstitutional effort by the state to impose its religious views onto vulnerable women. Furthermore, it claimed that under Missouri’s RFRA law, Satanic women could not be forced to comply with these procedures. Instead of answering whether RFRA protected members of The Satanic Temple from abortion restrictions, the court dismissed these cases on procedural grounds.
The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that since the plaintiff, a woman known as “Mary Doe,” was no longer pregnant by the time her case wound its way through the courts, she no longer needed an abortion and therefore had no legal standing to sue. The Satanic Temple appealed this ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.[shock horror]
To prevent similar rulings, ministers for The Satanic Temple created an “abortion ritual,” in which a woman affirms her own autonomy, obtains an abortion, and then concludes the ritual.
Since abortion is part of the ritual, The Satanic Temple argues, subjecting a woman to a waiting period is akin to the government interfering with a baptism or communion. In February 2021, The Satanic Temple filed a new lawsuit against Texas, arguing that the state was violating the religious liberty of its new plaintiff, referred to as “Ann Doe.”
The devil is in the details
The Satanic Temple raises important questions about what counts as a religion. Opponents of the group argue that abortion is a medical procedure, not a protected religious practice. But The Satanic Temple’s lawyer, Matthew Kezhaya, points to a 2009 case, Barr v. City of Sinton, in which Texas pastor Richard Barr was told the halfway house he operated violated a zoning ordinance.
The Texas Supreme Court ruled that excluding Barr’s halfway house from the city violated Texas’s RFRA law. Key to this argument was the court’s statement that, “The fact that a halfway house can be secular does not mean that it cannot be religious.” Likewise, Kezhaya argues, abortion can be both secular and religious, depending on context.
Kezhaya also disagrees that outsourcing the enforcement of abortion to private lawsuits makes the state of Texas immune to judicial review. He compared this situation to “racially restrictive covenants” of the Jim Crow era in which white residents signed legal agreements never to sell or rent their homes to African Americans.
The Supreme Court initially declined to hear cases challenging these covenants because they were considered private contracts. But in 1948, it ruled that a court enforcing these contracts was a state action that violated the 14th Amendment.
The Satanic Temple also has an even more creative strategy. The Food and Drug Administration, which controls the distribution of the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, is subject to the federal RFRA law. The Satanic Temple sent a letter to the FDA explaining that its prescription requirements illegally burden their abortion ritual. Currently, these drugs are only available with a doctor’s prescription, and the doctor must adhere to any state restrictions before providing them.
The Satanic Temple proposed an accommodation in which Satanic women can obtain a doctor’s note indicating only that these medications are safe for them to use, and then receive medication directly from The Satanic Temple rather than a state-approved provider.
In an interview with me in September 2021, Kezhaya, The Satanic Temple’s lawyer, admitted this was experimental territory. Assuming a court approved this accommodation, it could legally make The Satanic Temple a pharmacy, in addition to a religious entity, because it would be distributing controlled medications.
Is RFRA a “loophole?”
The Satanic Temple’s opponents claim it is abusing RFRA and using it as a “loophole” to circumvent the law. However, Lucien Greaves, a co-founder of The Satanic Temple, counters that RFRA was always intended to protect religious minorities from the government. If anyone is abusing it, he claims, it is companies like Hobby Lobby that invoked it to restrict the choices of their employees.
Critics of RFRA, such as legal scholar Marci Hamilton, warn that religious exemptions can turn the law into “Swiss cheese.” In other words, there could be so many religious loopholes that laws become meaningless. Whether or not this is a serious concern, it is certainly true that RFRA must not benefit only the Christian majority.
This is why constitutional law professor Jay Wexler has encouraged the work of groups like The Satanic Temple, stating, “Only by insisting on exercising these rights can Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheists and everybody else ensure that the Court’s new religious jurisprudence does not result in a public space occupied exclusively by Christian messages and symbols. At stake is nothing less than our national public life.”