Satanists sue Tennessee district for trying to thwart After School Satan Club
The trail of overt discrimination is long and well-documented in the lawsuit
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The Satanic Temple just filed a federal lawsuit against a school board in Tennessee for violating their rights by discriminating against a proposed After School Satan Club.
This particular one was slated to begin at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, Tennessee—not far from Memphis—this past January. But over the past few months, it became clear that the school wasn’t treating the group the same way it does other religious clubs.
I wrote about this a few months ago, so allow me to rehash a lot of that story before I get into why the Satanists are now suing the school district.
Just to remind everyone, these ASS Clubs do not promote Satan, Satanic beliefs, Satanism, or anything else like it. The Satanic Temple, which sponsors these groups, doesn’t even believe in a literal Satan. They aren’t interested in indoctrination. Rather, the Satanists “focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us.” It’s like a science club with a devilish twist.
There aren’t many of these groups to begin with—only four, including one in Pennsylvania where opposition to it led to a lawsuit that culminated in a settlement forcing the district to pay the Satanists over $200,000 in legal fees. That’s because The Satanic Temple isn’t trying to start these groups from scratch; they only come about in response to (Christian) Good News Clubs—and, even then, only when parents request it. In fact, that’s why The Satanic Temple was launching this one:
[The Satanic Temple] claims that the parents of 13 children at Chimneyrock Elementary had signed permission slips for the first After School Satan Club meeting there on Jan. 10.
The New York Times reported that they couldn’t “find a parent who signed a slip who was willing to be identified on the record,” but given the backlash this group often inspires, I wouldn’t want to put my family in danger by going public about signing my kids up for this either. Everything that involves The Satanic Temple, it seems, becomes controversial because conservative Christians simply can’t handle sharing space with people they don’t like even when the Satanists are playing by their rules.
You could tell Christians couldn’t handle it by looking at the responses in Tennessee, where critics couldn’t figure out any legal way to keep The Satanic Temple out... but still, idiotically, made their desires clear in the media. Seriously! They held a whole damn press conference about it.
There were the district officials who knew the law was on the Satanists’ side.
The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Toni Williams, said at a news conference with Christian pastors on Wednesday that she was “duty bound to uphold board policies, state laws and the Constitution.”
“But let’s not be fooled,” she said. “Let’s not be fooled by what we have seen in the past 24 hours, which is an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.”
Literally no one was demanding the district cancel all after-school activities. But Williams was right to say that the only way to block the ASS Club from meeting was to stop all extracurricular groups completely. It was the protesters and district officials, though, who were even considering that option.
She wasn’t alone:
School board member Mauricio Calvo, who represents the district that contains Chimneyrock, said the board would explore legal alternatives to “mitigate the situation.”
There were no legal alternatives besides shutting down all extracurricular activities, and there was no “situation” to “mitigate.” Everything was fine as is.
The Satanists just wanted the same access to students and the building that Christians had. (See? Simple.)
Calvo also said, “Just because a law is the law we don’t have to accept it.” (Spoiler: They literally do.)
In addition, Althea Greene, the Chair of the School Board, referred to The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club as the “enemy” and said “Satan has no room in this District.”
Then, there was a minister who couldn’t figure out how to break the law:
A local pastor, William A. Adkins Jr., said it was critical not to allow “any entity called ‘Satanic Temple’ to have time — private time — with our children.” But he acknowledged that he was not sure how to bar the group without violating the Constitution.
“This is in fact what I call Satan personified,” he said. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”
Curse those evil Satanists! They tricked Christians by… following the rules and doing everything by the book!
In other news reports, Adkins kept delivering the dumbest possible sound bites:
“They threaten to rent a facility under the First Amendment right and they entice us into saying no, and of course, they take us to court and then they look for a settlement,” said Bill Adkins, pastor of Greater Imani Church.
They didn’t “threaten” to rent a facility. They booked the room using the district’s own policies. If the district said no, then the district would be breaking the law. This wasn’t complicated unless you were trying to figure out a way to do something illegal, like this Christian pastor was.
And yet he kept talking!
“We cannot allow any entity called Satanic Temple to have private time with our children,” Adkins said. “I can’t go into the school building and pray. But yet we can rent a facility to the Satanic Temple and they can give a party for children. It’s ridiculous. It’s absurd.”
Statistically, kids are almost certainly safer in the presence of members of The Satanic Temple than youth pastors or Catholic priests. But to his point, it’s true Adkins can’t proselytize inside the school… and neither can Satanists. The Satanic Temple can rent space in the school because a Christian club already does the same thing. (Also, they were not throwing a “party.” Adkins just doesn’t know how to read.)
Finally, there were the local parents who couldn’t understand the concept of equal access. I don’t expect parents to know the law like district officials should, but it shouldn’t take a law degree to realize that a public school can’t pick and choose which religious groups are allowed to use space in its building.
“I think it’s B.S.,” said parent Courtney Dennis. “I think it needs to be held somewhere else and not a school.”
…
“I’m about to come unglued right now,” said grandparent Jenny Kincaid. “I cannot believe – this is a kindergarten through fifth-grade school, and they’re letting a Satanic club come in here?”
…
“It’s going to be where our children are,” said grandparent Tonya Vester. “We should have had some earlier notification. A chance to say, maybe this is not something the parents here would like.”
All of those people would usher in a theocracy given the chance.
The best comment in this category came from one parent who worried about a slippery slope:
Concerned parent Reggie Carrick said he felt the school system was letting kids down in order to dodge a lawsuit.
“This is gonna spread like wildfire. If they are able to get into one school, how many other schools are they plotting to do?” Carrick asked.
This would only “spread like wildfire” if the club was something kids and parents actually wanted to do. How many schools were Satanists “plotting” to enter? In theory, in all the schools that housed Christian clubs. But it’s not like they needed to do that. They received more publicity for their handful of clubs than the Good News Club ever seemed to get despite having nearly 80,000 clubs.
And unlike After School Satan clubs, those Christian ones are open about their desire to evangelize to and convert children.
No matter how many complaints there were, this particular After School Satan Club was scheduled to launch on January 10. (More on how that became controversial in a moment.)
Even after that first meeting, though, the future meetings were not a guarantee. A poster on Facebook listed all future monthly meetings as “pending.”
It turned out that hosting the first meeting was incredibly difficult behind the scenes. It only got worse afterwards. More importantly, the Satanists became more certain they were being treated differently from the Good News Club.
That’s why they’re now suing.
The lawsuit, filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation on behalf of The Satanic Temple in a federal district court on Monday, says the Shelby County Board of Education has violated the Satanists’ First Amendment rights.
… The district has charged The Satanic Temple discriminatory rental and security fees, refused to adequately communicate, and generally treated members of the educational group as second-class citizens.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools [MSCS] “cannot pick and choose how much it charges an organization renting its facilities based on how much it does or does not favor the organization’s viewpoint, the content of its speech, or its religious beliefs,” asserts FFRF’s lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. The district’s “unconstitutional behavior has chilled The Satanic Temple’s speech and substantially burdened its ability to exercise its religiously motivated practice of offering inclusive, welcoming religious clubs at public schools.”
In addition to all the comments I’ve documented above, the lawsuit’s lists a number of damning allegations. Among the claims:
The district kept the ASS Club’s application for space “pending” for over a month, making their first scheduled meeting in December a non-starter.
The district refused to pass out permission slips for After School Satan, claiming they couldn’t do that for third parties… even though they had done that for the Good News Club and even though it didn’t violate any district policies.
For the first meeting in January, the district charged The Satanic Temple an outrageous $2,045.60 “special security fee” (for ten police officers for four hours on the day of the meeting) and $250 for “field lights.” If the Satanists didn’t pay up, the district told them, they couldn’t meet. (The Good News Club was never assessed either of these charges.) The Satanists paid the cost. At that first meeting, on January 10, the Satanists said they only saw three security officers on site. Furthermore, there didn’t appear to be any “field lights” turned on.
After weeks of not replying to The Satanic Temple’s emails, the February meeting was moved by the district to a new location and the Satanists were told all future meetings would have to be held at 5:00pm (hardly after school!) to “allow time for the student dismissal process.” Then, just before the February meeting occurred, its start time was also changed by the district, forcing the Satanists “to arrange thirty minutes of child care from 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. for attendees.” There’s no evidence that the Good News Club was ever forced to make similar adjustments.
Despite the district canceling the future ASSC meetings in the reservation system, they still charged the Satanists $30-per-meeting insurance fees that are non-refundable.
In response to a records request for how much the district was charging the Good News Club to meet after school, the district (eventually) said that they were “not in possession of any public records” documenting those fees. The implication is obvious: Christians were not being charged to rent out meeting rooms, but the Satanists were being price-gouged for the same requests.
The bottom line is that the school district sure as hell seems to be treating the Satanist group differently from the Christian group, all in an effort to get them to go away.
Since November 2023, MSCS has refused to treat the Satanic Temple equal to other groups. MSCS continues to treat the Temple as a second-class citizen in an attempt to effectuate an unconstitutional heckler’s veto, bowing to internal and community hostility toward the Satanic Temple on the basis of its viewpoint, the content of its speech, and its religious beliefs…
Given the events of the past four plus months, MSCS has shown a continuous custom, policy, and practice of attempting to constructively block and deter the ASSC from meeting at Chimneyrock Elementary.
…
Over the preceding four-plus months, MSCS has demonstrated a widespread custom and practice of unnecessarily delaying approval or denial of the Satanic Temple’s rental applications, refusing to effectively communicate with the Satanic Temple, charging the Satanic Temple discriminatory rental rates and security fees, and unilaterally canceling the Temple’s rental applications.
It’s appalling how overt the discrimination by district officials seems to be toward the Satanists here. The lawsuit documents email after email sent to the district, requesting basic information about the status of the Satanists’ reservations—emails which never received any responses. Furthermore, the costs for the meetings seem to be made up as the district goes along. When refunds are given, they’re never explained. Couple that with the open hostility district officials gave when speaking about the club, and there isn’t any question that the district is breaking the law.
All the Satanists were asking for was to be treated the same way as other groups, including the Christian club. All the district had to do was say, “Sure.” They refused to do so, despite all the opportunities they were given, and only now, after many months, are the Satanists suing them.
It’s a long time coming.
FFRF summarized the case this way:
The district has since Jan. 10 continued attempts to thwart The Satanic Temple and deter its club for students from meeting at Chimneyrock. The district has abruptly changed the meeting time, unceremoniously canceled rental applications, refused to communicate with the Temple regarding rental rates, and continued to treat the Temple unfavorably. It’s clear that such illegal tactics are fueled by hostility toward The Satanic Temple’s speech, viewpoint and religion by school board members, administrators and other officials.
Incidentally, yesterday, the Satanists held their March meeting before school, presumably to avoid all the chaos after school.
I asked June Everett, the director of The Satanic Temple’s ASSC program, how that went and her answer was indicative of how poorly they’ve been treated by this district over the past several months. She gave me this rundown by email:
They stuck us in a "portable classroom" that was guarded. They threw up a screen so that nobody could see us, and stuck us at the end of a hallway that leads to the library that was not occupied… They were interrupted by the band class who came to grab their music stands where they were being stored.
She added that the district “has not approved our April or May BSSC meetings as of today.”
It needs to be repeated: If a Christian club was treated the same way by a public school district, there would be non-stop headlines about it in right-wing media. And they would have a point! This is blatant religious discrimination and the district hasn’t offered any reasonable defense for their treatment of the Satanists.
Now it’ll be up to a judge to figure out a punishment.
For what it’s worth, the Satanists are only asking for $1 in nominal damages (in addition to any legal fees). This isn’t about the money. This is about equal treatment under the law. If the people running the Good News Club at the school had any decency, they would be on the Satanists’ side here, calling on the district to treat other groups the same way they’re treated. But I’m not holding my breath waiting for conservative Christians to stand up for people outside their tribe who are actually being persecuted.
If you are feeling trapped into a lawsuit, the simple thing is to follow the fucking law. TST is not trying to force you into being a big fat bigot.
The issue you have with this group is not with the name, or what the club will be doing/teaching the kids, or anything about the club itself. The issue is; you know that if you had the opportunity to “have private time with” the children for your religion, the children won’t be safe. You know the GNCs, the group the TST is pushing back on, are not on the up and up, and are crossing the constitutionality line regularly, an you therefore assume the ASSC will do the same. It’s projection. And the reason why the ASSCs and the TST exist in the first place.
The problem with the idea that the ASSC needs police presence to protect the school/club/students only paints the Christian opposition as the villains. That they’re willing to put their own children in physical danger to get their way, that they really do not care about the safety of the children at all. The ASSC isn’t the group that is getting violent, making threats, acting like terrorists.
Good luck to the TST on their lawsuit.
Entrenched Christian privilege runs very deep in this country. Typically, when Christian groups are confronted with a group they cannot dispute on the basis of facts and reason, they do all they can to silence them. This all speaks directly to just how little confidence they actually have in the message they never stop trying to indoctrinate children with. It also speaks to their deep seated need to force their particular religion into the public schools, paid for with everyone's tax dollars.