The American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday that the Saucon Valley School District had agreed to pay $200,000 in attorney’s fees and to provide The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club it sponsors the same access to school facilities as is provided to other organizations.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in March after the district rescinded its earlier approval to allow the club to meet following criticism. The After School Satan Club, with the motto “Educatin’ with Satan,” had drawn protests and even a threat in February that prompted closure of district schools for a day and the later arrest of a person in another state.
Saucon Valley school district attorney Mark Fitzgerald told reporters in a statement that the district denies having discriminated against The Satanic Temple, its club or “the approximately four students” who attended its meetings. He said the district’s priorities were education and the safety of students and staff.
A lot of western Buddhism is Buddhist in the same way Satanic Temple is Satanist. IE it’s contingent and determined by the hegemonic cultural ideologies that are manufacturing it in to an identity available for consumption in an individualist capitalist context. Appropriated and removed from the context it originated and defined itself within.
It’s similar with certain Pagan groups, because Paganism was absorbed into Christendom, so what’s happening is people are manufacturing this modern notion of what Paganism was, completely removed from the conditions it existed in. And as you say there’s no standard, which is entirely the point I’m making, it’s up to the individual to construct their identity around it and decide “what it means for me.” That’s entirely different than the mode of traditional identity which was fulfilled by your role in the society, handed to you and determined. Now it’s a modern notion of authentic identity where you “discover me” and decide what that is. That’s why these pseudo-religious roles people claim cannot be genuine, the time and context they existed in are gone, and it’s now a form of packaging ideals that already exist in our culture in to a mode of commodification.
The tenants of the Satanic Temple are basically the hegemony of our modern culture, individual liberty etc. Satan as historically depicted provides the iconography, used in an ironic metaphorical sense, appropriated from the context from which it originated, commodified and consumed. That’s why I use the term hyperreal to describe it, because it’s a notion of something reflected back on itself through modes of representation.