The rejection by the Los Angeles Unified School District of allowing an “After School Satan Club” to use its facilities is likely to land the district in federal court. Meeting space for a club was requested for Chase Elementary School in Panorama City, but the district issued a statement this week that the proposal “does not meet the minimum requirement of having the school’s approval and, therefore, will not be offered at the school.”
Why would a Satanic-based group (the Satanic Temple) even want to have a presence in any public school?
“We think [Satanic clubs are] especially important when religious clubs target young children ages 5 to 12,” explained Lilith Starr, the founder of the Satanic Temple of Seattle, “because at these ages it can be hard for children to distinguish between official educators and the teachers proselytizing to them in the after-school clubs.” Starr was referring to the hundreds of after-school Good News Clubs, an evangelical Christian ministry, which have been founded across the nation in the years following Good News Bible Club v. Milford Central School District.
This 2001 Supreme Court decision held that if a school allows any organization to use school property, the property then must be opened to all organizations wishing to use it, whether secular or religious. Now, the Satanic Temple intends to use this decision to force school districts across the country that presently allow Good News Clubs to also allow an adversarial club that directly attacks the Christian faith.
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While it is an unknown as to what position the U.S. Supreme Court would take, were such a case to actually make it that far, the reality is that most school districts fear any type of legal action against them. The Mount Vernon School District in Washington State was advised by its attorney, Duncan Fobes, that they “would face costly litigation” were they to deny equal access to the Satanists. This is, of course, what the Satanic group is counting on — that the mere threat of a lawsuit will cause many school districts, especially smaller ones that cannot afford costly litigation, to cave to their demands.
This provides a clue to what the real intent behind the demands may be. One of the arguments often used to keep the Gideons organization from coming onto public school grounds to hand out New Testaments to schoolchildren is “if you let the Gideons in, you have to let the Satanists in.” Or the Junior KKK. Or whatever will cause the school district to keep the Christians out.
And so, when groups such the Satanic Temple announce their intention to place their own “after school clubs” in grade schools, many will simply throw up their hands and kick the Christians out.
Starr recently told the Seattle Skeptics Society that the Temple’s goal is to fight against “the religious overreach” that, she claims “is just out of control right now across the nation.”
Starr’s autobiography is entitled The Happy Satanist. In it, she recalls her battles against depression, during which time she lost “her marriage, her house, her job and her friends due to an out-of-control addiction to nitrous oxide,” better known as laughing gas. She eventually converted to Satanism through reading her new husband’s Satanic Bible. This led her to found the Seattle Temple in 2014, which now has grown to 78 members. Starr says that members end their meetings by invoking the name of Satan.
But, in reality, the group claims that it does not even believe in the existence of a literal devil or any deity. It says it uses Satan “as a metaphor for fighting religious tyranny and oppression.” Of course, other Satanists do acknowledge the existence of Satan as well as God, but they choose to honor Satan while waging war against God and His laws.
A closer examination of the Satanic Temple reveals that it is a mostly left-wing political organization. For instance, in addition to advocating the placement of rival clubs in the schools alongside “religious after school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations,” the group opposes corporal punishment in the schools and also opposes “laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy.” Its pro-abortion position would, of course, put it in the mainstream of today’s Democratic Party. Interestingly, the Satanic Temple states in its Seven Tenets that “people are fallible.” This would place the group in the mainstream of Christianity, which teaches, as does the Bible, that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Certainly the Satanic Temple’s concern that elementary schoolchildren would be harmed by the Good News Clubs exposes its hypocrisy. After all, if Temple members were really concerned that children in the public schools are being indoctrinated with only one point of view, without the opportunity for them to even hear an opposing view, they would have to reject much of the leftist indoctrination that now passes, virtually unchallenged, for “education” in our public schools. In fact, if they were truly against the government imposing a particular view on schoolchildren, it would seem they would support the separation of school and state — that is, private schooling — so that the government would no longer determine what is taught.
But at the very least, if they really were all about giving “equal time” to conflicting points of view, they would oppose teaching Darwinian evolution as a scientific fact,, and would instead want to present it as a theory while also presenting the case for creationism.
But, of course, this is not what they are about. Nor is it what leftists in general are about, now or in the past. The famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925, was not about whether evolution could be taught in the Tennessee public schools, but about whether it could be taught as a fact. William Jennings Bryan, who offered his legal services for free to the state’s case, was greatly concerned about the social ramifications of teaching Darwinism as a scientific fact. (I discuss this at length in my book History’s Greatest Libels). Specifically, Bryan was concerned that teaching that certain “races” of human beings were further along in the claimed evolutionary process than others would lead de-humanizing and even exterminating the supposedly inferior races.
In George Hunter’s Civic Biology, being used in many American high schools at the time, Hunter called certain people “parasites” on society, and stated his case bluntly: “If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading.” Bryan predicted that such teachings could lead to genocide — and he issued this warning more than a decade before the National Socialist (Nazis) Party under Adolf Hitler attempted to implement the logical conclusions of such a belief system in Europe.
If the Satanic Temple folks and other leftists were truly concerned about the minds of elementary schoolchildren being warped by dangerous doctrines, they would not be attacking Good News Clubs, but would instead welcome their inclusion in the public schools as a counterbalance to the schools’ teaching of secular humanist philosophy and scientific thought including Darwinism. But of course, they want to keep God out of the school curriculum while keeping secular humanism in.
On the other hand, when Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he remarked, “The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to conceive the one without the other.”
The Declaration of Independence holds that our very rights come from God, not from government. This was clearly understood by the Founding Fathers, but in modern America it is considered something to be relegated to after-school clubs that have to share time with Satanic clubs.
