The "religious freedom" sword cuts both ways, motherfuckers. This is gonna be good.Boston's Satanic Temple has been granted tax-exempt status by the IRS. The group says it will now launch legal battles against religious discrimination and pursue faith-based government grants, as well as access to public spaces used by other religions. HAIL SATAN!
This may be the only way to deal with the fetus-fetishists: Turn their god-bothering back on them and stand firm on the fundamental reality.
On Monday, the Missouri State Court Western Appellate District will hear oral arguments from a religious organization challenging an abortion law — but not from the type of group you might expect.The Satanic Temple is arguing that Missouri’s abortion restrictions — specifically, its informed consent law and mandatory 72-hour waiting period for abortions — violates the religious freedom of one of its members who believes in reproductive autonomy and scientific fact. The United State Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit will hear arguments in the case later this month.The organization, which sees Satan as a symbol and “embraces rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism,” filed state and federal lawsuits in the spring of 2015 on behalf of a pregnant woman seeking an abortion in the state, identified only as Mary Joe.In 2014, the organization announced an initiative that would allow members of the Satanic Temple to use waivers to exempt themselves from Missouri’s provisions based on their religious beliefs. Mary Joe attempted to use this waiver to circumvent Missouri’s restrictions, but it was rejected, prompting this lawsuit.Informed consent laws require patients seeking abortions to read pamphlets designed to dissuade them from choosing the procedure. Often, the pregnant person must also receive an ultrasound. Six states require that patients are told that personhood begins at conception and 13 states require that patients are told about the fetus’ ability to feel pain, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Twenty-seven states have mandatory waiting periods and just four states have 72-hour waiting periods, the longest in the country.
According to the The Satanic Temple, requiring members to look at non-scientific information in order to access an abortion is a violation of its beliefs. The group also argues that the 72-hour waiting period in Missouri violates the Free Exercise Clause because it asks members of The Satanic Temple to “consider a religious proposition with which they do not agree.”The state filed a motion to dismiss last September, arguing that these restrictions do not promote the state’s religious beliefs and simply happen to “coincide or harmonize with the tenets of some or all religions.”The Satanic Temple has turned its attention to abortion restrictions in recent years, after the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Hobby Lobby found that closely held businesses that have religious objections to contraceptives should not be required to cover them on their employees’ insurance — effectively broadening religious liberty claims.Since then, the Satanic Temple has been using religious liberty grounds to argue in favor of better access to reproductive care. In addition to going after informed consent laws and waiting periods in Missouri, the organization also issued a statement last year saying it would sue Texas for its new rules requiring aborted fetal tissue to be buried or cremated. It stated that its members were not requiredto comply with the law since burial rites were part of a religious practice and requiring a specific method goes against its religious freedom rights.
The point being that no supernatural being presented these to human beings. Or rather that no bunch of Bronze Age desert goat-fuckers claimed they got them from their invisible sky wizard.
These are the tenets of behavior that human beings have tried to follow since we first evolved into human beings. These are the guidelines that allow us to live and work and love within a community of others.
No one ever has to order us to follow them. Our conscience does that for us.
Divine Irony:
Satanic Temple: Seven Tenets Are Morally Superior To Ten Commandments
•Strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
•The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
•One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
•The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo your own.
•Beliefs should conform to our best scientific understanding of the world. We should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs.
•People are fallible. If we make a mistake, we should do our best to rectify it and resolve any harm that may have been caused.
•Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.
Satanic Temple Chapter Offers to Help Muslims Who Fear Backlash
One day, parents will tell their children to bring home a nice Satanist.
Oh, Satanists. Is there no conservatard stupidity you can't beat?
Think Progress:
The Satanic Temple, a faith community that ascribes to seven central tenets that track closely with humanism, is seeking a religious exemption from Missouri’s 72-hour abortion waiting period on the grounds that the law violates their sincerely held beliefs about bodily autonomy.Payback's a bitch, motherfuckers.
The St. Louis chapter of the Satanic Temple says they were recently contacted by a Satanist woman, whom they identify only as “Mary,” who is struggling to navigate Missouri’s harsh abortion laws as she attempts to end a pregnancy. She lives hundreds of miles away from the state’s only abortion clinic, and she doesn’t have the means to make the trip twice in order to comply with the state’s mandatory counseling and 72-hour waiting requirements. So her religious leaders are stepping in on her behalf.
Satanic Temple leaders set up a crowdfunding site to raise money to help Mary cover the expenses associated with her abortion procedure. And they’re also arguing that, based on their community’s religious tenets — which stipulate that “one’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone” and “we should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit our beliefs” — Mary should be able to get a faith-based exemption to the state’s 72-hour waiting period.
SNIP
The Satanic Temple — sometimes described as “the nicest Satanic cult in the world” — is a unique blend of activism, satire, and what appear to be sincere humanist beliefs. Over the past several years, its adherents have used several creative campaigns to test the limits of religious freedom, like pointing out that laws allowing Christian prayer in school will also ensure that kids can pray to Satan.
Mary’s case fits into Satanists’ larger effort to use the framework set forth by the recent Hobby Lobby case to argue that they should be exempt from state-level abortion restrictions. Last summer, on the heels of a Supreme Court decision that awarded Hobby Lobby’s evangelical owners the right to drop insurance coverage for birth control methods that violate their religious beliefs, the leaders of the Satanic Temple launched a “Religious Reproductive Liberty” campaign.
As part of that campaign, the Satanic Temple makes the religious case against abortion restrictions that are based on junk science and medical misinformation — and fights for the right to use faith-based arguments to strengthen, rather than weaken, access to reproductive health care.The logo for the Satanic Temple’s religious reproductive rights campaign
CREDIT: Satanic Temple
“While religio-conservative views seek to undermine abortion rights, they have also steadily worked to define ‘religious liberty’ to be understood in terms of reserving the the right to deny contraceptives and oppose rational family planning practices. In fact, religious liberty works the other way, too,” Lucien Greaves, the head of The Satanic Temple, said in a statement provided to the Friendly Atheist blog.
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