Profiles in Cowardice: Concord, NH Mayor Byron Champlin

Fake hard-asses always see attacking The Satanic Temple as an opportunity to pretend they are brave with no expectation of consequences

The other day, reports began to surface that The Satanic Temple’s modest holiday display outside the New Hampshire State House had been destroyed. I had been present at its unveiling and anticipated that it would soon be assaulted, posting to social media that “[m]onuments will come and go, and this one may not last the night, but the spirit of pluralism and personal freedom will not be erased.” Speaking to The Friendly Atheist, I explained that destruction of our holiday displays has “become as much of a holiday tradition as trampled grandmothers in a Black Friday stampede.”

State Rep. Ellen Read had released a statement celebrating pluralism and religious freedom, though anticipating the attacks that the Satanic display was likely to suffer: “Everything has the potential to offend,” she wrote, “even the nearby nativity scene. Not only is over a third of the state not religious, never mind Christian, but I can imagine those who have been judged, harmed, or abused by the Christian church feeling offended by the nativity scene displayed on public grounds. And yet the nativity scene has stood perennially, unmolested, for years.”

The City of Concord was obligated to accept the display as soon as they agreed to accept privately managed religious displays on public grounds. However, in an announcement made via Facebook, the city idiotically framed their “decision” as one driven over fear of litigation, not one of respect for the laws preserving fundamental democratic freedoms. “Throughout the country,” they wrote, “The Satanic Temple has both threatened and brought lawsuits under the First Amendment when excluded.”

In framing their acceptance of our display in this way, the city of Concord conveys both fear and confusion regarding the First Amendment. Fear in that they clearly feel threatened by legal guarantees preserving free expression and religious liberty, confusion in that they confess that the city spent time “reviewing its legal options” before “deciding” to follow the law, indicating that they needed expert advice on issues that should be prerequisite knowledge for any public official.

Adding to the idiocy, the city, in its statement, twice, without subtlety, referred to the public displays at the state house as “unattended,” for no other purpose than to presumably invite vandalism. But if the city was trying to ingratiate themselves to those who would destroy our display, their insistence on presenting our presence as a demand they accommodated against their will for fear of legal retribution ensured that precisely nobody would be impressed, and comments following news reports indicate that nobody was. Framing their decision as coerced made it appear as consent given from cowardice and incompetence. They indicated that they were afraid of legal action and conveyed that they were unprepared to face a court challenge.

Of course, a more mature approach to the situation would have been for the city to explain that either approving or disapproving religious displays is an administrative process that in no way gives the government any authority in which to approve or disapprove of a religion itself. For such is not, nor should ever be, the function of a government in any society that values religious liberty and self determination. Minimally, our public officials should not only understand this principle of government viewpoint neutrality, but respect it and value it as well. They should also have the courage to defend this principle in the face of short-sighted mobs who, in their fragility, would rather remove the fundamental underpinnings of democracy, granting the government authority over issues of religious expression and identity, than to risk seeing a holiday display that does not match their beliefs or expectations.

Concord Mayor Byron Champlin perfectly embodied the image of a confused and trembling fake hard-ass in an interview with the Boston Globe explaining that he opposed our display on the grounds that he decided to attribute an agenda to our inclusion that we never claimed nor implied: “I opposed the permit on the basis that the request was not made in the interest of promoting religious equity, but to drive an anti-religious political agenda leveraging the attention one can receive during this time of year.”

Of course, if endowed with the ability to give a subjective evaluation regarding an inferred, concealed intent of any public expression, the mayor would be giving himself a carte blanche to define any public forum participant’s “true” beliefs for them, without any reference to supporting facts or the participating party’s own statements of intent. One could just as easily say that the nativity residing on the same state house grounds is nothing more than a crass advertisement for a religious viewpoint “obviously” placed there by individuals guilty of unpunished heinous acts that they superstitiously hope can be atoned for by way of public tribute to their god. Or, one could decide that the particular nativity in Concord is also driven by an anti-religious political agenda, being that there is no attempt to define what this means. One assumes that Champlin feels our “real” goal was that religious displays be disallowed. But, in fact, our goal was to put up our display, as demonstrated by the fact that that is what we did. If anybody has an “anti-religious political agenda” it is the politicians who grandstand against minority religious voices and call for limitations on religious freedom with an insistence on official preference for their own viewpoints.

Champlin stating that he was inclined to deny our permit to place the display, while also acknowledging that the law conflicted with his preference, lays bare another irksome quality of the cowardly fake hard-ass: boldness in taking up legal disputes when it is somebody else’s money at stake. Champlin seems eager to spend public money in hopes of bolstering his image to the ignorant and offended because he is either too ignorant to understand the nature of religious freedom himself, or too spineless to defend it publicly.

In fact, annually, fake hard-asses are attracted to the idea of destroying our displays in hopes of drawing the approbation of a thoughtless mob of outrage consumers. They pretend they are acting with heroic bravery, when in reality they believe the stakes are low, that there are no consequences for their actions, and that nobody will actually defend The Satanic Temple when it is all said and done anyways. Last year in Iowa, a tender-headed simpleton named Michael Cassidy laid down his action figures in his playpen in Mississippi to travel to Iowa where he destroyed our holiday display in the Capitol Rotunda, only to immediately turn himself in expecting immediate praise. He got it from Fox and other “conservative” outlets (a misnomer given their anything-but-conservative willingness to discard the First Amendment), but was soon crying in disbelief and frantic anxiety when he was charged with a hate crime for his antics. He recomposed himself and pretended to be a hard-ass once more when the state dropped the hate crime charge. Bravery comes in knowing the consequences and accepting them anyways. Fake hard-asses like Cassidy expect no consequences but desperately want to be seen as brave.

Cassidy was not a public official, but he was (or is) in the Navy, making his behavior just as cowardly as Champlin’s. Both took an oath to defend American democratic values, and both lacked the wit or bravery to do so in even the least difficult scenario presented to them. Of course, in presenting themselves as heroes, it becomes something of a necessity that The Satanic Temple be characterized as bullies. As I said to the Friendly Atheist, “they attack our property, threaten us over social media, destroy our displays, then bewail the violence they imagine we did them. But hopefully, for some, our limited presence and perseverance will prove inspirational in demonstrating that freedom of religion—the ability to believe or disbelieve as we see fit without consequence to our civic capacities—is still alive, and more in need of defending now than at any other time in our lives.”

The real demonstrations of bravery in all of this — as well as the real demonstrations in defense of religious freedom — are displayed by our congregants who are willing to face hostile and misinformed locals, to weather the threats, accusations, and outrage, all to assert pluralism, holiday well wishes, and a defense of free expression, even as fake hard-asses slander their motivations, rage publicly in violent temper tantrums, and ultimately vandalize their work. While Champlin displays a dereliction in duty, citizen Satanists in New Hampshire are working to preserve the equal rights of all.