Dear Jason Rapert

Dear Jason Rapert,

This past April, as reported by MassLive, and as you are well aware, a “federal judge sided with The Satanic Temple and other groups in a lawsuit against state officials in Arkansas, who erected a monument depicting the Bible’s Ten Commandments at the State Capitol Building but then blocked the temple’s request to put up its own statue of Baphomet.”

The case centered on fundamental issues regarding First Amendment liberties and government viewpoint neutrality. The question as to whether or not the government is allowed to preferentially endorse a specific religious viewpoint to the exclusion of others cuts to the core of founding American democratic ideals that our challenge to Arkansas’s open, official viewpoint discrimination sought to defend. The freedom guaranteed to us that we might follow our own conscience, creed, and religious identity, whether that of pious faith or adamant disbelief, without interference of the government, and without fear of a diminishment of our civic capacities, is arguably the very root of liberty, without which we could in nowise be considered “free.”

With the stakes being nothing short of democratic pluralism, it strikes one as obscenely arrogant, verging on outright solipsistic, that you are now to be found giving lachrymose interviews in which you shamelessly assert that (what you refer to as) the “lawfare” against the Arkansas 10 Commandments was all about you. Today, The Western Journal published a piece in which you self-pityingly bewail that the legal battle was a result of you being “targeted” for the simple reason that you claim to be a Christian. “They were trying to break me, to break my will,” you cry. You go on to also claim audaciously, given your questionable over-fundraising and the use of taxpayer money to fund the Attorney General’s office defence of the 10 Commandments battle, that the lawsuit attempted to “break” you “financially” as well.

In claiming to have been targeted for allegedly being a Christian, you suggest that as a Christian, you could have done nothing other, in your role as a Senator, than to dutifully sponsor a Christian Nationalist bill-mill template calling for the placement of a donated 10 Commandments monument on the public grounds of the state capitol in Little Rock. And here again we find you conveniently ignoring those Christians who spoke clearly and passionately at public hearings, in op eds, and in interviews, against the government claiming any domain over matters of religion, against allowing opportunists like yourself to use that which Christians hold sacred as a crass blunt instrument in a short-sighted Culture War.

Render unto Caesar, practice humility, the “log in your own eye,” and all of that. As a Satanist, my blasphemy is inward-directed, a personal declaration of my independence from theistic belief. Your blasphemy, however, falsely claims the justification of the cross, using it for your own cheap, obvious self-enrichment, and is therefore truly offensive.

You say you “have had threats from many left­ist or­ga­ni­za­tions that said they want­ed to op­pose the mon­u­ment,” but you fail to say what manner of threats or specifically from who. For our part, we brought our Baphomet monument to the Arkansas state capitol to rally for religious liberty in 2018, where we were confronted by the threats of Confederate flag-waving thugs and gun-wielding counter-protesters. We held the rally at our own expense and at our peril, donning bullet-proof plates and facing the public, while you “fought” to diminish religious freedom from the comfort of an air-conditioned office, and on the taxpayers’ dime. You cry that you were compelled to give testimony, while the Attorney General’s office needlessly deposed me for 7 hours straight, 2 consecutive days, attempting to demand revelation of superfluous private details. In comparison, you were treated mildly while you insisted that much of what you did in the public’s name was “privileged,” and therefore not appropriate for public disclosure.

Your sudden concern over threats rings particularly irksome considering the great lengths you went to publicly post any personal, identifying, or even locational details about me any time such information became available.

Now, in the depths of your profound, impenetrable ignorance, you indicate that you have not even bothered to read the decision from the federal court in favor of The Satanic Temple, deeming the 10 Commandments monument illegal. You are quoted as saying, “I be­lieve they told [me] the de­ci­sion is 142 pages long and [the Judge] men­tioned me by name 168 times in the de­ci­sion per­son­al­ly.” You also feign shock, imagining that the decision flies in the face of a prior Supreme Court ruling. If you had bothered to read the decision, you would understand why the precedent set in 2005 by the Supreme Court in Van Or­den v. Per­ry, which allowed for an over 40 year-old 10 Commandments monument to remain on public grounds in Texas was not applicable in the case of a new stand-alone public 10 Commandments that was clearly afforded official preference in exclusion of another monument of religious significance. But then, I told you how Van Orden v. Perry did not apply well before that. Multiple times. I told you in a hearing we had regarding our Baphomet application. I told you in a televised “debate.” I wrote it out in response to your grandstanding online countless times. And what I told you was affirmed by the court. And you still have not bothered to listen.

Tellingly, all you seem to know about the ruling is that you are allegedly mentioned 168 times. Had you ever managed to overcome this practiced stupidity of yours which prevents you from so much as hearing anything with which you disagree, you would realize that you were warned of this in advance as well. I was not the only one to tell you that your public grandstanding about bringing the Gospel to the public square by way of the 10 Commandments monument, in contradiction to your legal arguments about the monument serving a secular function of honoring “heritage & history,” would not go unnoticed by the court. Nor, you were also warned, would the court likely ignore the substantial sums you received from organizations and individuals who explicitly seek to impose the Christian religion through government coercion. This, Mr. Rapert, is why you are mentioned at length in the ruling. It was you who demonstrated unambiguously to the court the disingenuous nature of “your” 10 Commandments bill.

Now, your pride wounded, the case lost, you imagine that it will be overturned on appeal. But you have given the appeals court disappearingly little to work with, even if inclined to rule in your direction. Your blind ignorant zeal, your thoughtless certainty, your immunity to facts, and your ill-advised campaign for publicity in which you repeatedly contradicted any appearance of respect for First Amendment principles — these betrayed the lie of your “heritage & history” argument that unconvincingly, and insultingly, claimed your monument to be in honor of the foundations of American law.

But, of course, the arguments you undermined with your attention-hungry public sermons and blustering interviews were never yours to begin with, which is why you never understood the cleverly-crafted mendacious legal arguments made in the 10 Commandments bill you sponsored. You lacked the sense to follow the script you were handed, and your crusade suffered for it. You were, it turns out, a bad investment for the donors whom you have failed.

As a consolation prize, you wish to fashion yourself a martyr. You want to believe that all this confusing dialogue about Constitutional Law and Civil Liberties is secondary to you, and that first and foremost this entire affair was a result of you being “targeted.” But at the end of the day, you were just a name signed to a bill you never actually understood and, like the ruling, probably never read. You were a monkey dancing for theocrats who handed you your marching orders and watched in dismay as you charged headlong in the wrong direction, making the wrong statements, openly giving up the game, laying the scam bare for all to see. You are not, and never will be, a leader, but a failed pawn for an inept, yet nonetheless somehow still powerful, authoritarian movement in which you rank as an embarrassing Insignificant.

I told you how this would go. And so it went. Jason Raperts will come and go, but Freedom of Conscience, Freethought, Individual Dignity, Freedom of and From Religion, will always eventually overcome Rapertian ignorance, intolerance, and autocratic hypocrisy.

Anyways, enjoy your summer!

Love,

Lucien Greaves