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.
It would be absolutely hilarious (and sad) if the abortion-as-a-sacrament effort takes off, and clinics in abortion-free states start becoming official Satanic Temple places of worship left and right, complete with minimal decorations and everything, clinic doctors as priests, things like that.
They’d probably have to win a court challenge first, but that could totally happen.
Like, what’s the bare minimum for something to legally be considered a sacrament? What about a place of worship? What legal avenues can states even approach without running into a strong constitutional conflict? All these edge cases are fascinating to me, especially with how much of a headache they’ll give state legislatures.
The effort is underway. Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic is a Satanic abortion clinic in New Mexico that offers teleheath consultations and medication abortion through the mail.
clinics in abortion-free states start becoming official Satanic Temple places of worship left and right, complete with minimal decorations and everything, clinic doctors as priests, things like that.
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.
why bother?
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.
