Church and state: Giving the devil his due

last updated 8 January 2015

If Oklahoma’s government wants to promote Christianity, said Amanda Marcotte in Salon.com, it will have to give equal time to Satan. Last week, a prankster group calling itself the Satanic Temple unveiled a proposal for a monument to be erected outside the state Capitol: A 7-foot-tall goat-headed demon relaxing on a pentagram-engraved throne, with smiling children at its side. “Hilarious as the statue is, it was designed to make a serious point.” A Ten Commandments monument was placed on Capitol grounds in 2012, so unless the legislature wants to be seen as endorsing Christianity—violating the Constitution’s prohibition on state-sanctioned religion—it has to make public property available to all religions. In making that point, I just wish the faux Satanists were “a little more tasteful,” said Robin Abcarian in the Los Angeles Times. When you’re walking across the Capitol’s deserted lawn at dusk, you don’t want to run into a “horned creature right out of the scary part of Ghostbusters.”

This pagan idol is never, ever going to be installed, said Jim Treacher in DailyCaller.com. First of all, the state legislature is refusing to sign off on any new monuments, since courts have yet to rule on an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the Ten Commandments statue. But erecting a tribute to Beelzebub was never really the Satanic Temple’s aim. This is a sophomoric provocation—“a big ‘F--- you, Dad!’ to the rest of America.” Yet it’s disturbing to see liberals rally around the Satanists, said Robert Knight in The Washington Times. They’ve been so blinded by the ideology of equality—in which same-sex “marriages” are identical to the real thing—that they now believe God and Satan, good and evil, “are the flip sides of each other, roughly equal.”

When it comes to religion, “the government can’t play favorites,” said Steve Benen in MSNBC.com. “There are, after all, no second-class American citizens when it comes to the First Amendment,” which is why other groups—from Hindus to the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—are now demanding a space at the Capitol. Oklahoma’s legislature might not like all this multicultural clutter on their state lawn. But they opened the door with the Ten Commandments tablet, “and it’s going to get crowded as others walk through it.”