#*respectful nod and jovial fistbump to the Satanic Temple*

[thaylepo]

What's great about the Satanic Temple is partly that they do this kind of thing to expose the very real christian religious biases in american politics and legislature to the cold light of day, but also to be a figurative meat shield for any non-christian religions to actually take advantage of these policies of religious freedom.

There is a definite and very vocal demographic of the american population that would lose their holy shit over a public Kwanzaa display or a Menorah at the capital building, and make it everybody's fucking problem so hard that it becomes easier to just say NO ONE gets to display their holidays except for the so-widely familiar christmas stuff that christians legit believe is secular because it's just so normal and common to them.

This vocal demographic of shitheads is now too preoccupied with the presence of a literal Satanic display and has been neatly routed into publicly and loudly losing their holy shit about their own imaginary boogeyman coming to eat America's souls. Not only are they now distracted from protesting about candles and vegetable altars, their whole platform of fearmongering loses any rational credibility they've tried to give it when it is exposed as "the scary red man who lives underground is coming for our children".

The Satanic Temple has done so much for religious freedom in that country, just by literally propping up a giant strawman with horns and a pitchfork and letting the christian extremists go so absolutely fucking apeshit over it that anyone with an ounce of common sense goes "yikes" and wants to distance themselves from the whole lot of it XD

Also has the added bonus delight of watching conservatives have meltdowns over religious freedom

Iowa Republicans voted to allow religious holiday displays in the capital building...so the Satanic Temple applied for and received permission to put theirs up. And now certain people are losing their minds about it. It's fantastic.

I respect Satanic Temple's habit of poking that boundary - people with no empathy have a hard time with hypothetical questions like "how would you feel if someone else did the same thing to you as you are doing to them?" so it's nice that they'll politely demonstrate in practice instead. People who can't imagine how they would feel if someone else put their own religion all over places that they can't avoid dealing with, so the most efficient way to tell them that they wouldn't like that is to show them.