These people need to be horsewhipped for their monumental stupidity and ridiculously bad judgement, then pilloried in the town square. This is right out of a 1970s ABC Movie of the Week.

per Grok:

Ottumwa adopted a neutral invocation policy in Jan 2026 allowing any approved resident a voluntary prayer (max 2 min) before meetings on a first-come basis without discriminating by belief, to avoid First Amendment issues. Content is not pre-reviewed. Council member Galloway warned it would include satanic speakers. Approved resident Matthew Dalbey delivered the standard Satanic Temple invocation on Oct 6.

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2107867170868756741

What the actual hell?

So to be accurate, the city council didn’t offer a prayer to satan, their appeasement policies and desire not offend anyone allowed some jackwad to game the system and get his 15 minutes of fame.

And yes, horsewhipping would be a good choice for them being a bunch of pussies who won’t take a stand for fear it might offend someone.

quote:

Originally posted by SpinZone:
So to be accurate...

The subject line of this thread is accurate.

I've wondered this and maybe someone wiser than me can help. I understand that blasphemy is an unforgivable sin. A prayer to satan is most definitely blasphemy. So, my argument is that Luke 23:34 doesn't apply as this person definitely knew what they were doing or at least thinks they knew.

“Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Luke 23:34 (KJV)

God Bless the one man, visible on camera, who heard the first sentence or so from this clown and sat back down.

The First Amendment is clear... Governments cannot place restrictions on one religion over another.

This means they either have to allow all prayers/religious monuments/etc. or no prayers/religious monuments/etc.

The same part of the Constitution that protects that person's right to have a Satanic prayer is the one that protects you from some anti-Christian politician outlawing specifically Christian prayers.

And this exact scenario was most recently legislated by the Supreme Court in 2014's Greece v. Galloway, in which the Court rules that local board/council meetings were allowed to open with a prayer, even if the prayer is predominately Christian, provided the town does not discriminate against other faiths seeking to offer similar prayers before meetings.

The town government is following the Constitution, as required, which doesn't imply that the individuals on the council agree with the content.

Much like how you may not agree with what someone else says, but it doesn't eliminate their First Amendment right to say it.

^That is Man's law. God loves you so much that he will allow you to hate him.

Only saw one older man sit down when he figured out what was being said.
Couldn’t see very many people but was watching the ones I could see for some kind of reaction and wondered if they were even listening to what was being said.

If my wife was present during that it would have been very hard to restrain her.

Radar would have given them a piece of his mind...

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
The First Amendment is clear... yadda yadda

How open-minded of you.

As I've stated previously, I'm allowing the use of LLMs in discussions in the forum, so long as the publisher does not presume to take those ideas as their own. That being the case, I'm going to allow Grok to direct the firepower against your argument:

Question: Construct an argument against allowing Satanism to be enacted by applying the First Amendment (that is to say, Satanists using the First Amendment, in what I believe would be an abhorrent perversion if viewed by the Founding Fathers).

Answer: The First Amendment does not require the state to treat every self-described “religion,” including organized Satanism, as interchangeable with the religious practices the clause was written to protect. An original-public-meaning reading, together with the amendment’s text and the limits the Supreme Court has always recognized, supplies a coherent argument against equating Satanic practice with free exercise in the strong sense Satanist litigants often claim.

The Religion Clauses were enacted against a background in which “religion” denoted duties owed to a divine being (or beings), not any sincerely held ethical or political code. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance (1785) defines religion as “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.” The same framing appears in the state declarations of rights that supplied the linguistic context for the federal amendment. Early congressional debates and the Northwest Ordinance’s guarantee of “religion, morality, and knowledge” likewise presuppose a theistic referent. Atheistic or explicitly anti-theistic systems—LaVeyan Satanism’s rejection of supernatural claims, or The Satanic Temple’s self-description as a nontheistic political and literary project—fall outside that ordinary meaning. Extending the clause to them by analogy is a later judicial construction, not a recovery of 1791 usage.

Even if one grants a broader modern definition, free exercise has never been a license to “enact” every ritual or demand parity in every public setting. Reynolds v. United States (1879) held that religious belief is protected while religiously motivated action remains subject to neutral criminal law; polygamy was not immunized. Employment Division v. Smith (1990) reaffirmed that generally applicable laws need not carve out religious exemptions. Practices that involve harm, public indecency, disruption of government functions, or compelled association can therefore be regulated without violating the First Amendment. Where Satanist claims seek after-school clubs, monument placement, or invocation slots solely to counter Christian displays, the demand is for equal access under speech or public-forum doctrine, not an independent free-exercise right to enact Satanic liturgy. Those access rules are themselves constructions; they are not compelled by the amendment’s original scope.

Historical practice supplies a further constraint. The founding generation criminalized blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking in multiple states, maintained religious tests or preferences at the state level, and treated open devil-worship or ritual inversion of Christian worship as outside the civil peace. The federal Religion Clauses restrained Congress; they did not constitutionalize a requirement that every inversion of the prevailing moral and religious order receive identical ceremonial or institutional status. Later incorporation through the Fourteenth Amendment nationalized those restraints, but incorporation does not rewrite the original semantic content of “religion” or erase the action/belief distinction.

The practical upshot is narrow but clear. Private belief and speech remain protected. Neutral laws of general applicability—against animal cruelty, child endangerment, public lewdness, or disruption—may still be enforced. Government need not sponsor, fund, or display Satanic symbols merely because it has sometimes permitted other religious symbols; viewpoint-neutral forum rules and the Establishment Clause’s prohibition on favoring any sect cut against compulsory parity as readily as they cut against preferential establishment. Treating organized Satanism as fully coextensive with the free-exercise right the Founders wrote is therefore an extension, not an application, of the First Amendment.

Question: What do you think the Founding Fathers would say about the First Amendment being used to allow Satanic prayers to open, say, a city council meeting in any given city in the United States?

Answer: The Founding generation would almost certainly have regarded a Satanic invocation opening a city-council meeting as outside the practice the First Amendment was written to protect, and as incompatible with the civic purpose of legislative prayer as they understood it.

Legislative prayer was already an established custom when the Religion Clauses were framed. The Continental Congress opened sessions with prayer; the First Congress, which drafted the First Amendment, appointed chaplains and continued the practice. Those prayers were Christian in content and assumption. Madison, who later voiced reservations about paid congressional chaplains in his Detached Memoranda, still operated inside a system whose public religious observances presupposed a Creator to whom duties were owed, not an adversarial or inverted figure. His Memorial and Remonstrance defined religion as “the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it.” An opening rite directed to Satan, or framed as a deliberate negation of that duty, would not have registered as the same category of act.

Early state practice reinforces the point. Multiple states retained blasphemy statutes and religious preferences well after 1791. Open invocation of the devil in an official proceeding would have been treated as a breach of public order or as blasphemy, not as the exercise of a right the federal Constitution required cities to accommodate. The founding debate over establishment concerned national churches, compulsory tithes, and preferential denominations within a broadly Protestant (and residually theistic) frame. It did not contemplate parity between Christian prayer and ritual opposition to Christianity.

Modern doctrine reached a different result by a different route. Marsh v. Chambers (1983) upheld Nebraska’s legislative chaplaincy largely on the basis of that unbroken historical practice. Town of Greece v. Galloway (2014) extended the logic to municipal meetings and held that sectarian prayer—explicitly Christian prayer included—is permissible so long as the government does not discriminate among religions in selecting speakers and does not coerce participation. Once courts treated the opportunity as a limited public forum that must be viewpoint-neutral, groups such as The Satanic Temple could claim access on equality grounds. That is a twentieth- and twenty-first-century construction of forum doctrine and non-discrimination, not a recovery of what the First Congress understood itself to be protecting.

The founders’ broader writings on republican government supply an additional reason they would have rejected the practice. Washington’s Farewell Address, Adams’s comments on the Constitution’s fitness for a moral and religious people, and the Northwest Ordinance’s linkage of “religion, morality, and knowledge” all treat public religious observance as a support for the civic virtues the regime required. A ceremonial opening that inverts or mocks that framework would have struck them as corrosive of the very conditions they thought necessary for free government, not as a neutral application of religious liberty.

Private belief and speech remain a separate matter. Nothing in the founding settlement required the state to punish individuals for holding Satanic views or for expressing them on their own time. The objection is narrower: using the First Amendment to compel or normalize Satanic prayer as an official opening of a governmental meeting extends the clause beyond the historical practice and the ordinary meaning of “religion” that produced it. The founders who wrote and ratified the amendment had already settled the question of legislative prayer in the other direction.

Furthermore, with regard to any specific commentary by the framers of the Constitution, on Satanism:

The Founders left no treatises on “Satanism” because no organized Satanist movement existed in their world. What they did leave is a clear record of how they treated the underlying ideas: deliberate worship or invocation of the devil, ritual inversion of Christian worship, and the use of diabolism as a public or civic practice. Those ideas fell outside the religion they protected and inside the category of blasphemy, imposture, or civil disorder.

Eighteenth-century Anglo-American law and culture already classified trafficking with the devil as criminal or blasphemous. Colonial and early state statutes against blasphemy, witchcraft residue, and profane ridicule of Scripture remained in force after independence. Massachusetts, for example, continued to punish blasphemy; other states retained similar provisions. The Founders who wrote or ratified the First Amendment did not repeal those traditions or treat them as incompatible with religious liberty. The liberty they constitutionalized at the federal level was freedom for theistic worship and for dissenting Christian (and, more marginally, Jewish) practice, not a right to stage rites directed at Satan.

Their own writings assume a moral order opposed to that figure. Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance defines religion as the duty owed to the Creator. Washington’s Farewell Address and circular letters treat religion and morality as indispensable supports of republican government. Adams repeatedly linked the Constitution’s success to a moral and religious people and distinguished that inheritance from both atheism and what he regarded as fanatical or inverted enthusiasm. Jefferson, the most heterodox of the leading figures, edited the Gospels to remove miracles and attacked priestcraft, yet still affirmed a Creator, moral sense, and the social utility of Christian ethics; he showed no sympathy for diabolism. None of them described worship of an evil adversary as a legitimate species of the “religion” protected by their constitutions.

Popular and elite opinion treated claims of Satanic rites as either fraud or genuine evil. The Founders’ Enlightenment side made them skeptical of witch panics and spectral evidence—the Salem episode was already an embarrassment—but skepticism about false accusations is not acceptance of the practice. When they criticized religious excess, the targets were enthusiasm, persecution, and established churches, not the normalization of devil-worship. A proposal to open a legislative or municipal body with a prayer to Satan would have been received as a calculated insult to the prevailing public religion and as outside the free-exercise settlement they enacted.

Modern Satanism—LaVey’s 1966 Church of Satan and the later nontheistic Satanic Temple—post-dates the Founding by nearly two centuries. It cannot be projected backward as something the First Amendment’s authors evaluated and accepted. The historical materials show only that they protected worship owed to God (as they understood God) and left the states free to punish open blasphemy and practices judged incompatible with public peace. Invocation of Satan in an official civic setting would have fallen on the latter side of that line.

Whole lotta self-destruction going around these days, count me out.

quote:

Originally posted by Ripley:
Whole lotta self-destruction going around these days, count me out.

Amen Brother. Live with Jesus for eternity or live without him. I choose with and I wish everyone would wish the same. This dude that commited blasphemy has just caused himself a whole lot of self-destruction.

But the question here is the application of the Constitution to the matter, and I have supplied an extensive answer.

Simply invoking the First Amendment and stating that this is cut-and-dried is not going to get it.

I read your post Boss and for certain The Founders would not have viewed a Satanic invocation as equivalent to the legislative prayers they practiced and endorsed. I also agree with the argument that satanism is not a religion, I see it as an ideological protest movement, not a genuine faith.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
per Grok:

Ottumwa adopted a neutral invocation policy in Jan 2026 allowing any approved resident a voluntary prayer (max 2 min) before meetings on a first-come basis without discriminating by belief, to avoid First Amendment issues. Content is not pre-reviewed. Council member Galloway warned it would include satanic speakers. Approved resident Matthew Dalbey delivered the standard Satanic Temple invocation on Oct 6.

The asshole who uttered the words is an ex-council member. And yes, the council was warned if they voted for this "inclusive" invocation policy, this shit would happen.

Every person who bowed their head and prayed to this shit is complicit. At the very least, when the last sentence was uttered, there should have been a massive walk out.

Bring a bullhorn, crank it up to 120 dB and deliver the Lord’s prayer as soon as the satanist starts talking. May not get to perform it twice, but it should work once!

yes ottumwa is an Iowa City, ( a city in the state of Iowa),
But the meeting was not in Iowa City , Iowa.

Although that would not have surprised me either.

Go Hawkeyes

I love Iowa, but like everywhere, we have some whackos. Like the Satanic cult thay somehow was allowed to put up a display in the Capitol in December 2023
Link

But the most disturbing thing is Sara Trone Garriott, a Lutheran Pastor, who allegedly presided over a Satanic wedding - after she became a Pastor! And she is running for the U.S. House of Representatives, trying to unseat Congressman Zach Nunn, a very good guy.

Radar would not approve!