As a new wave of After School Satan Clubs (ASSC) generate controversy in school districts where pre-existing evangelical fundamentalist indoctrination-based after school clubs feel threatened by our presence, recent events should give pause to those who would violate our first amendment rights in an effort to halt the program. In Saucon Valley, PA, the school district has agreed to pay $200,000 in a settlement reached after The Satanic Temple (TST) took legal action following the district’s discriminatory efforts to block ASSC from using school facilities. The ACLU, having represented ASSC in this dispute, issued a press release stating that the “settlement comes approximately six months after a federal court ordered district officials to allow the ASSC to convene at the Saucon Valley Middle School, ruling that the district had the likely violated the First Amendment when it prevented students and families from gathering on school grounds in connection with the TST-sponsored club. Under the settlement, the district must give TST and the ASSC the same access to school facilities as other comparable organizations receive. The agreement also prohibits the district from retaliating against TST, the ASSC, and their volunteers and members based on their viewpoint or ‘the exercise of their First Amendment rights.’ The district has agreed to pay $200,000 in attorneys’ fees and costs to TST’s attorneys.”
“We are pleased that this matter has been resolved and that the school district has agreed to stop all discrimination against us,” said June Everett, director of TST’s ASSC programming. “Thanks to the court’s order, we were able to hold ASSC meetings at the Saucon Valley Middle School, and the kids who attended were overjoyed. It’s for them that we took on this legal fight in the first place, and we won’t hesitate to do so again if other school districts continue to enact discriminatory policies.”
Of course, money is often no object for under-qualified opportunistic public officials who are all too willing to waste public funds in the name of misguided crusades designed to leverage public fear and ignorance into votes. In Saucon Valley, however, four school board incumbents were voted out in favor of challengers who ran a campaign primarily focused on the enormous, pointless waste they incurred by violating TST’s civil liberties.
In Virginia, where a school board changed the requirements for establishing an after school club in hopes of preventing ASSC from operating, the new standards ironically ended up driving away the evangelical fundamentalist “Good News Club” that the ASSC was created as an alternative to. In an email from the Good News Club obtained by ASSC, their local coordinator explained, “we are not in the Cheasapeake public elementary schools this school year due to regulations that have been put in place that are blocking us from holding the Good News Club right after school.”
Of course, in contrasting the ASSC against Good News Clubs, it is not difficult for reasonable people to understand why parents would like the option of sending their child to an After School Satan Club, where the focus is on critical thinking-building activities and rational inquiry, rather than a Good News Club designed to indoctrinate children into a fear of eternal damnation and torment for violating the precepts of a narrow, theistic religious viewpoint. Avoiding any rational, objective comparison of values or educational content between clubs, our opposition has grown increasingly desperate to denigrate our objectives, either by attributing speculative hidden motives to our activities, or offering non sequitur evidence against our legitimacy. Writing for Daily Wire, “journalist” Luke Rosiak could do no better but to suggest that a deranged Christian gunman who opened fire in a Virginia Wal-Mart a year ago was somehow representative of The Satanic Temple’s values by virtue of the fact that he claimed to have been compelled by the voice of Satan.
In Connecticut, however, our request to establish an ASSC is being met with local resistance that is every bit as ignorant, though not at all as disingenuous. Amy Bourdan, who ironically runs an “advocacy group that promotes religious freedom” in Connecticut called “Parent’s Choice” objects to both TST’s religious freedom, and to parent’s having a choice between after school clubs operated by religious organizations. Surprisingly, however, Bourdan seems to accurately grasp the goals of ASSC, objecting to them for what they really are. As she explained on a local news broadcast, “The context and the content of what they’re teaching the children, to have self autonomy and that they are the ones that should have the final say over what they think and what they believe, is contrary to what the parents are trying to teach at home.”
Not all parents, Amy. Perhaps it is time to stop wasteful public crusades that seek to unconstitutionally limit our civil liberties, and to respect the choices of non-Christian parents, too.
After School Satan Club: New Clubs & Recent Victories 2023: A Chat With ASSC Director June Everett