The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It may be effective – it’s definitely fun to watch
The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It may be effective – it’s definitely fun to watch
Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the group uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them
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.
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I'm well aware of the fact that Lucien Graeves is a shitbag, but TST does great work in spite of that, and they're one of the only organizations that fight theistic nationalists in ways that actually bring attention to the issue.
Until a better group with unproblematic leadership comes along (maybe Global Order of Satan if they gain the resources to do similar activism?), I'd say it makes sense to critically support their work instead of dissuading people from supporting them at all.
Wanna give me the TLDW? Cuz that’s too long and I didn’t watch it.
If you jump around the video Lucien Greaves' real name is Doug Misicko
List of problems surrounding TST in the video:
Anti-Semitism: around 13:00 Ties to the far-right: 17:14 Views on Eugenics: 20:08
I'll add more later. I don't exactly have the video memorized
meh. it can't all be perfect. media can spin things how they want. the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
There are some people you don't want to associate with, even when you have common cause.
Hezbollah is opposed to the genocide in Gaza (and the murder of Palestinians in the West Bank), as is Iran. I'm opposed to the genocide in Gaza. I'm sure as fuck not gonna ally myself with Hezbollah or the Ayatollah Khamenei, even on that one issue.
I'm not saying that TST is a bunch of terrorists, but I'm using hyperbole to make a point. It's up to you if you want to associate with a group that has some very, very shady upper leadership. Personally, I loved 95% of the people at a local level when I was a member; I think there are a lot of great people involved. I just think that national leadership is entirely untrustworthy and fucks up things that should be simple and easy.
AFAICT, Mesner, not Misicko. Look at the legal filings, where they're incorporating TST-related entities, etc.; Doug and Cevin have to use their real, legal names on those documents.
The antisemitism you can kind of handwave, because it's hard to disentangle being opposed to Judaism as a religion, versus Jewish people. Mesner has been a little wishy-washy on that, but the most charitable way of reading it is that he's opposed to the religion, in the same way that he's opposed to Christianity, Islam, etc. It's just messier with Judaism because Jewish is both religion and ethnicity/cultural. (This, BTW, is the same way that people opposed to Israel's actions in Gaza and Lebanon get tarred as being antisemitic.)
Ties to the far right are probably valid.
Views on eugenics is... Complicated. Eugenics is, by itself, not really bad. Ashkanzi Jews have practiced eugenics to almsot entirely eliminate Tay-Sachs Syndrome in their communities, because marriages are arranged, and all couples go through genetic testing before being allowed to marry. You could do the same thing with sickle-cell anemia; test everyone before they get married, and couples that both have copies of the gene don't get married. OTOH, in both of those cases you're talking about specific, known genetic disease; most people that are in favor of eugenics aren't talking about eradicating genetic diseases, but are talking about very nebulous concepts of 'purity' or some such. E.g., blond hair/blue eyes ubermensch nonsense.
An immediate problem is that the org itself is deeply authoritarian, and numerous people that helped the org grow have been thrown out (or left) because they don't want a top-down leadership structure. Doug and Cevin--mostly Cevin--have total legal authority over the organization, and there's no mechanism in place to censure or remove them if they do things the membership disapproves of, or engage in misconduct.