The Satanic Temple Suing the City of Boston

The Satanic Temple (TST) filed suit against the city of Boston, Massachusetts. The city provides council members the choice of who gives the invocation before each meeting when they should be accepting requests from any community member to cite the prayer without regard for which deity they worship.

The Satanic Temple Sues Boston City Council for Religious Discrimination https://tst.link/LitigationUpdate

Posted by The Satanic Temple on Tuesday, 26 January 2021

As of now, the city’s loose adherence to the law allows council members, on a rotating basis, the choice of inviting which community member will provide the opening prayer. According to the Satan Temple (TST), the latter option leads to favoritism and effectively discriminates against people who hold unpopular religious beliefs.
As noted in the lawsuit, the Supreme Court previously ruled invocation prayers must be open to local citizens of all faiths or none at all. If Boston refuses to allow Satanists to be a part of that tradition, that is a discriminatory violation. The Satanists ask the courts to decree Boston’s “prayer scheme” unconstitutional.
The Satanic Temple's prayer is as follows:
"Let us stand now, unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds in darkened times.
Let us embrace the Luciferian impulse to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.
Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations.
Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true.
Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of One or All. That which will not bend must break, and that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.
It is Done. Hail Satan."

“This case is not a challenge to legislative prayers, generally, and it is not a challenge to offensive prayers, particularly,” according to the complaint filed on Sunday. “We take no issue with the fact that the city permits many congregations to invoke Jesus before council

meetings. We just want an equal opportunity — one guaranteed by the Constitution — to invoke Satan.”

The lawsuit explains that TST’s Boston chapter members formally requested to provide invocations in 2016 and 2017.  Because TST had no council member to promote them, they were not permitted to speak. The reason seems to be that TST lacks the political clout to solicit an invitation from any council member.

The Satanists add that, between 2011 and 2017, there were 233 invocations. They were disproportionately awarded to Christians, Muslims, and Jews — representing Abrahamic religions. None of those invocations were given by “Wiccans, other Pagans, and Native Americans.”

From the Satanic Temple web page, the About Us tab makes the following statement:
“We have publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, applied for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women's reproductive autonomy, exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with our tenets.”

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