https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/about-us
I highly recommend reading the tenets. Good stuff.
“RELIGIOUS FREEDO-No, not like that!”
You have the freedom to be a Christian, but anything else and you’re not a Real American TM.
ps: And if you’re the wrong variety of Christian we’ll be watching you.
Those kids are very brave. School bullying is no joke. My daughter was bullied so harshly in her middle school that we had to pull her out of school and put her in online school. The school administration did nothing for her and they’ll do even less than nothing for kids in this club that get bullied by religious students. I feel really bad for them in that regard and I hope they make it through without too much scarring.
The school administration did nothing for her and they’ll do even less than nothing for kids in this club that get bullied by religious students.
I think part of the purpose of the club is to create a sense of shared identity and form a collective defense mechanism against bullying by aggressive students and administrators.
Of course, this gives the administration one big target to smash rather than a bunch of little targets. But that’s the nature of organizing in defiance of a violent and oppressive authority.
Maybe, but as kids found out who formed a Gay-Straight Alliance group in my high school back in the 90s, being united doesn’t really stop the bullying.
The Gay-Straight Alliances formed back in the 90s were critical to establishing the LGBT population as a real and recognizable social cohort in need of a distinct codified set of legal rights. Prior to the formation of these groups, it was entirely too common for kids to be taught in school that gay relationships were a sign of physical and sexual abuse, a mental illness, and a moral perversion. Having a community in the school of out-kids who could testify to the contrary made a huge difference in how the subsequent generation of students (and their parents - I got to watch in real time family friends go from implicit bigots to LGBT advocates) perceived of the LGBT population.
Being united doesn’t stop the bullying immediately. But it brings bullying into sharp relief and turns it into a conflict between groups rather than a social stigma against individuals.
I don’t disagree with you, but these are the first group of kids doing this club, so they’re going to face the brunt of the bullying, which is why I said they were brave and why I hope it doesn’t scar them.
they’re going to face the brunt of the bullying
They likely already were facing a lot of bullying. I’m old enough to remember people claiming that being gay meant you could give people AIDS from a toilet seat. I had a Health textbook that described “gay bowel syndrome” as a chronic condition caused by intimacy. Nevermind the teacher-sponsored religious groups that talked about how sinful it was to express any kind of affection towards one another. Just enormous amounts of misinformation, fear, and hate. And if you were a singular Out voice, it all got directed at you.
Clubs like this are as much an immediate defensive measure and emotional support group as a long-term progressive spearhead.
Which isn’t to say that spearheading the project doesn’t take an immense amount of bravery (and hard work and some exceptional social skills). But I think it mistakes the pre-organized LGBT community as somehow enjoying security through obscurity, rather than a population that simply suffered in silence.
What infuriates me about articles like this is that it really should just say that the school Satanic Club had its first meeting, the kids had a great time, here’s everything they did and what they plan to do for the year, and here are some kids’ reactions and quotes about the club.
Instead, it says the kids had “a great time” and then moves on to the protesters, offering them several paragraphs to spew their vile hate speech, repeating the garbage that their hate-filled signs say, and then even quoting two people. And then it follows that with basically an advertisement for “the Good News club, a Christian evangelical Bible club that meets before school hours.”
It’s a sign of how biased society is towards religion that an article about a non-theistic after school club gives half of the article to a handful of religious bigots to let them spew their hate speech and then promotes their own Christian school club.
