Official Satanic Panic and The Satanic Temple's Federal Free Speech and Religious Exercise Lawsuit

Yesterday, under representation from the ACLU of Iowa, we (The Satanic Temple), filed a federal Free Speech and Religious Exercise lawsuit as the result of a refusal, on the part of Iowa state officials, to allow us the same public accommodations they grant other religious groups. While this is not particularly unusual, for those who are aware of TST’s history and our ongoing battles to preserve actual Religious Liberty — the freedom to believe, or not believe, and to identify with our religious opinion as we see fit — the religious discrimination we have been faced with in Iowa has been particularly egregious and indefensible. All it took was a simple holiday display in the state capitol rotunda during December of 2023, constructed and placed by our local congregation, for Iowa officials to completely abandon any pretense of judicious, professional public service neutrality, and any loyalty to the Constitution they falsely swore to uphold. So openly contemptuous and dismissive of fundamental First Amendment guarantees, as well as the limits to their authority as state lawmakers, are they, that the Iowa Senate, in 2024, filed a bill that sought to actually illegalize Satanism, the text of which stated, in part, that:

The state or any political subdivision of the state shall not recognize organizations or individuals who refer to Satan as a deity, worship Satan, or who reference Satan or Satanism as part of the organization’s or individual’s religious practice as an establishment of religion.

Making perfectly clear that the Senate Bill was a direct reply to The Satanic Temple’s controversial holiday display having been placed in the rotunda the year prior, the bill continued:

Displays, symbols, or the practice of Satanic worship shall not be allowed on public property, in public schools, on property owned by public schools, or on any property owned by the state or its political subdivisions.

Given the unambiguous targeting of activity that was specific to The Satanic Temple alone, the next bit of text in the bill appeared irresponsibly slanderous in a way that indicated, at best, a complete disregard for our safety, if not an intentional provocation and license to those who would do violence against us:

Any act of Satanic practice or worship that involves the ending of a life or the shedding of blood, whether the sacrifice be an animal or human, is prohibited.

Naturally, human and animal sacrifice are already illegal, and while we practice no such things, we seek no exemptions from those laws. Such pointless text suggests its inclusion was for no other reason than to misinform the public about who we are and what we believe in the most denigrating fashion possible. But then, as the bill’s text goes on, it begins to seem plausible that the authors truly were too simply-minded to conceive of the possibility of differing opinions and interpretations in the realm of religious opinion. In superstitious language befitting of a rural medieval witch-hunt, the bill continued:

The general assembly finds that good and evil exist. The supreme being, upon whom we depend for continued blessings, personifies that which is good. Evil is personified in the creature known as Satan. It is the duty of the government to play an appropriate role in protecting the inhabitant residents of Iowa from evil while encouraging and facilitating good. It is legally and constitutionally inconsistent to afford Satan, who is universally understood to be an enemy of God, religious expression on public property by a state government that depends upon God for continued blessings.

The depths of ignorance contained in that passage are too vast for this piece to explore, and in any case, the bill did not pass into law, nor is it what our federal lawsuit is about. But the fact that such a ludicrous, paranoid, superstition-mongering, conspiracy theorizing Satanic Panic text could be presented shamelessly by actual lawmakers in the Iowa Senate, who intended it should be passed into law, should give readers some sense of the absurdity we face in Iowa, as well as a sense for the debt of gratitude we owe to our congregation there, which has unflinchingly faced it publicly in a desperate bid to protect pluralism in the face of a Christian Nationalist takeover. Far too often, our activities are contextualized in the press as though they are merely hilarious public pranks, but the stakes really could not be higher, both in terms of the personal safety of those we work with, and in terms of national precedent our wins or losses might set.

The capitol administrator who approved our congregation’s request to place the holiday display in the rotunda in 2023 is named Adam Steen. Steen later ran a gubernatorial campaign almost solely on the strength of the claim that he would deny The Satanic Temple any further public accommodations, as he denied TST access to public grounds in years subsequent to the 2023 display. As explained in the ACLU of Iowa’s press release regarding our lawsuit, “starting in 2024 and continuing through 2026, the state repeatedly denied and unduly delayed TST’s applications and follow-up communications from TST for permission to hold a winter holiday event and display with family-friendly activities, such as singing carols, coloring pages, creating make-and-take ornaments, and a Krampus costume contest.”

The Krampus costume contest denial was particularly absurd as, fumbling for any type of justification at all to deny us, Steen’s office settled for declaring that it was for fear of children’s safety that the event was denied. Krampus, they reasoned, is a mythical punisher who was said to have administered corporal punishment to unruly children. Surely, then, if people among us at this proposed holiday event on capitol grounds were to be dressed as Krampus, they would also have no choice but to also wantonly beat upon any nearby children as well. Content with this denial, the state did not reply to any offers to amend the proposal.

Following this bizarre denial, the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers (IAF) filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the office of the Iowa governor, Kim Reynolds, requesting all communications and documents related to the denial of our congregation’s holiday event. The “Governor’s Office refused to produce the requested documents, citing “executive privilege,” even though what was requested was clearly non-privileged: an executive agency report and documents relating to media preparation. Some relevant materials were turned over, but much was redacted. Also, the Governor’s Office provided hundreds of pages of news clippings that mentioned the controversy but which did not actually address the request,” explains another press release from ACLU Iowa in which they announced filing suit on behalf of IAF.

The flagrant disregard for law among public officials in Iowa is apparently pervasive, and greatly alarming. Steen, while campaigning, openly abandoned any tactical attempt at legal-speak to attempt justification for his disregard toward the First Amendment when promising to discriminate against The Satanic Temple. It was a bizarre strategy that indicated he was willing to sink substantial taxpayer funds to a lawsuit he was essentially asking to lose in hopes that his grandstanding would win him the GOP’s gubernatorial nomination. It did not. But it also raised the question, if Steen never cared about the First Amendment to begin with, and he felt that acting in defiance of it was to display courage, was it simple cowardice that compelled him to approve the holiday display of 2023? It gave his entire campaign the feel of one continuous unforced error that will now haunt him even after his aspirations for the governor’s office have been closed out in defeat. The cowardly little asshole is going to have a difficult time framing his discrimination against us in any legally defensible fashion after publicly grandstanding endlessly that he intentionally and willfully discriminated against us for no other reason than that he did not approve of our religious identity.

ACLU Iowa explains:

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa by the ACLU of Iowa for its clients, TST and Mortimer Adramelech, Minister of Satan of the Iowa congregation of TST. The ACLU of Iowa is co-counseling the case with the Hasso & Wilson Law Firm and Kezhaya Law PLC.

The lawsuit asks the court to:

• Find that the state officials’ denials violated TST’s and Adramelech’s federal constitutional rights to free speech, free exercise of religion, and equal protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

• Find that state officials also violated TST’s and Adramelech’s rights at the state level to nondiscrimination and religious freedom under the Iowa Civil Rights Act and Iowa Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

• Order State Department of Administrative Services officials to cease these violations and specifically to allow The Satanic Temple to host a holiday event at the Capitol this December as the lawsuit proceeds.

• Award damages for past violations.

Matt Kezhaya, general counsel for TST, says:

“The Constitution protects unpopular viewpoints from political power, not the other way around. A public official’s highest duty is to protect the Constitution, especially when doing so is unpopular. The then-director of the state agency in charge of granting and denying applications to hold holiday events at the Capitol, Adam Steen, has been candid that the government’s decision to deny The Satanic Temple was because of disagreement with TST’s religious viewpoint. He has made clear his own desire to exclude The Satanic Temple from a public forum, but this case is about a broader departure from the Constitution. Iowa officials continue to deny TST equal access based on stereotypes they know to be false. The First Amendment does not allow government officials to pick and choose which religions may participate in public life.”