Godless Libs Of Tulsa, OK, City Council To No Longer Force Jesus On People Just Trying To Attend Their Meetings
Good for you Tulsa, Oklahoma!
The City Council of Tulsa, Oklahoma — faced with the choice of upsetting Christian Republican legislators or making non-Christian community members feel like they didn’t belong — voted 8-0 (with one abstaining) this week to eliminate the practice of starting each meeting with a prayer invocation.
Now, instead of invocations, there will be a moment of silence, so that everyone will have to sit there and feel uncomfortable instead of just those whose religion is not represented by the opening prayer.
As Hemant Mehta of Friendly Atheist reports, this all started last year after the invocation was delivered by Amy Hardy-McAdams, co-owner and creator of the Strawberry Moon Herbal Apothecary & Ritual Center in Broken Arrow. Hardy-McAdams, who described herself as “a Third-Degree High Priestess of the Artemisian Faerie Faith Tradition of Witchcraft” (which I’m sure is a real thing), was invited by retiring City Councilmember Crista Patrick, who also happened to be a Pagan and wished to see her faith represented at the meeting just as Christianity had been.
In her invocation, Hardy-McAdams said:
As a Priestess of the Goddess, I invoke the Gorgonaea, champions of equality and sacred rage. I call to Medusa, monstrous hero of the oppressed and abused. I open the Eye of Medusa, the stare that petrifies injustice.
I call upon the serpent that rises from this land to face the Stars, the movement of wisdom unbound.
May these leaders find within themselves the Embodied Divine, the sacred essence of the spark of the Universe and the breath of the Awen.
And you will be shocked to hear that it did not go over so well! In fact, it resulted in a big to-do and kerfuffle from many Republican officeholders, including Gov. Kevin Stitt, who claimed that the invocation meant “Satan is trying to establish a foothold” in Tulsa, which feels like a fascinating Days of Our Lives plotline.
State Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters — the Christian Nationalist creep who is running around trying to force Bibles and the Ten Commandments into classrooms — was similarly displeased, tweeting that “Satanic prayers are welcome in Hell but not in Oklahoma. Satanism is not a religion. Tulsa should immediately move to ensure this never happens again and the person who allowed it should be held accountable.”
To be clear, as a Pagan, it is highly unlikely that Hardy-McAdams even believes in the Literal Christian Satan. Also, The Satanic Temple is legally recognized, by the IRS, as a religion in the United States — though they don’t actually believe in the Literal Christian Satan either. In fact, the only people who believe in the Literal Christian Satan are Christians.
However, their opposition was not what inspired the Council to change their minds about opening their meetings with a prayer. Rather, it was because councilmembers realized that the prayers were making people who didn’t believe in whichever religion (or non-religion, as an atheist leader was invited to speak in December) feel weird and like they didn’t belong there.
“Sometimes … we have student groups that come through that you'll see youth that are visibly wearing lettered clothing or jewelry that indicates they're from a non-Christian faith,” Councilperson Laura Bellis said. “And, of course, we have invocations that […] anyone can sign up with any faith for — the one time they may be there, they often, usually, is a Christian prayer, and may send a message to them that their government's up for them or they don't belong.”
See! We can all learn and grow. Even me, as you may notice that I have made it through an entire article about the state of Oklahoma without a single reference to the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein. (Which technically I just did, but you get my point!)
Of course, the whole point of those prayers, for people like Kevin Stitt and Ryan Walters, is to let those people know that the government is not for them and that they don’t belong — because that’s the only thing that makes people like that feel like they do. If they’re not excluding someone, how do they know they’re really in the in-crowd?
Council Chairman Phil Lakin assured people that this does not mean that people will not be able to pray at meetings — it just means that they will not be led in prayer by anyone else and can instead recite their own prayers to themselves, in their own minds, without bothering anyone.
Incredibly, people can actually do this at any time, even without an official moment of silence in which everyone else must also either pray, or recite song lyrics in their head, or just spend the whole time trying to determine if it would be disruptive to get up and go to the bathroom, because of how it’s weird to sit silently, doing nothing, in a room full of strangers.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Bwahahah Robyn I love you
OT: In all the flurry of fascism and performative meanness in the last few days, it was easy to miss the fact that Vivek has been shitcanned and exiled, probably forever, from maga world. Bannon hated him for being a brown, but his dis on American workers was probably not helpful either. he lasted approximately .5 Scaramucci's.