Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the group uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them
Satan is a feminist now
The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills: on Friday, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho renewed a legal push to drastically reduce access to mifepristone.
Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple.
Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple (which is not to be confused with the very different Church of Satan) is not about devil worship. Rather, it is about raising hell to fight for freedom from the religious right’s crusade to impose their beliefs on everyone else. “Right now, we have a minority religious theocratic movement, so entrenched in politics and getting away with whatever they want,” co-founder Lucien Greaves told the Guardian earlier this year.
why bother pretending that they’re places of worship? religious hospitals and schools don’t pretend to be places of worship and they apply their their prejudices anyways; so long as it they don’t violate federal law.
just create a satanic hospital with an extremely generous obstetrics wings & laboratories and satanic obgyn schools.
they could even take this a step further and get trans people to identify as satanic and that their trans identification is an expression of religion; protected by law and invalidating any anti trans laws.
they could also apply this to library book bans by saying that the trans and gay books they’re banning are texts sacred to their religion and must be displayed like the bible or the ten commandments.
They need to go the extra mile, to make it as difficult as possible to challenge them legally. Christian hosptials and such aren’t going to get invesigated or sued for being Christian hospitals, but the Satanic Temple won’t get it easy anywhere.
The Satanic Temple supports it’s trans members using the same basis as it’s stance on abortion. There are 7 fundamental tenets of Satanism. The third states that “One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.” and the fifth is “Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.” Based on these tenets it is the religious stance of TST that trans individuals have a fundamental religious right to decide what happens to their body and a religious obligation to reject unscientific claims and “treatments” with regard to their gender identity.
They tend to have large congregations who donate enthusiastically to the local elected bigot bureaucrats in their city and state. The Satanic Temple as a loophole is cute, but there is no Congressman or Judge who relies on Satanic congregants to raise money or GOTV.