Satanic Temple Announces 'After School Satan Club' In Memphis School, Wingnuts Freak Out, As Designed

It's a really simple stimulus-response chain at this point

All aboard the Beelzebus! Image created using DreamStudio AI and Photoshop

Those fun-loving secularist First Amendment trolls at the Satanic Temple are at it again, announcing Tuesday that Tennessee will be getting its very first After School Satan Club, to launch January 10 at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Memphis. This follows other projects like sponsoring a Satanic Christmas Tree in Wisconsin, a “fallen angel” Christmas display in the Florida Capitol, and demanding statues of Baphomet be erected wherever states put up Ten Commandments monuments, because government isn’t allowed to promote one religion over others. And of course, the After School Satan Clubs, which last year made Tucker Carlson very upset.

As we always point out, the Satanic Temple folks don’t actually worship Satan. Rather, they’re atheists who like making a snarky point about public endorsements of religion. Here’s their Facebook announcement of the new school club in Memphis, co-sponsored by The Reason Alliance. The announcement notes that the group “views Satan as a literary figure who represents a metaphorical construct of rejecting tyranny and championing the human mind and spirit.” It also reassures readers that it doesn’t do any religious indoctrinating at all, beyond telling kids they should think for themselves, which is pretty blasphemous all on its own. A brochure for the clubs notes further that the clubs won’t be “offering any materials or lectures to your child about Satanism;” instead, it’ll be about “free inquiry and rationalism” and encouraging kids to be the little inquisitive scientists they’re hardwired to be.

Haha, as if any of that would actually calm down panicky Christianists!

Also, bonus points to the Memphis Commercial Appeal, which decided that the Temple’s cosponsor was “the Reasonable Alliance.” That’s so friendly-sounding we urge the group to adopt it.

And right on cue, along came longtime rightwing culture wars scold Todd Starnes to personally wet himself at the very idea of an afterschool club doing science activities and critical thinking and stuff, with the name “Satan” invoked to make people like Todd Starnes personally wet himself. How dare they! Afterschool clubs should be called “The Good News Club” or some such, which are explicitly aimed at proselytizing to children on school campuses.

Following the Let’s Be Very Outraged script that the Satanic Temple knows will play out whenever it announces a new chapter of the clubs, Starnes, “reporting” for the talk radio station he owns in Memphis, went to Kristin New, chair of the Shelby County chapter of Moms Who Panic Over Everything:

“My first reaction is we told you so. […] We said this would happen. We said that they were coming after your kids. They said we were liars and conspiracy theorists.”

And lo, it was so, apart from the tiny detail that the club isn’t religious and isn’t “coming after” anyone’s kids, although encouraging critical thinking has been mistaken for an anti-Christian plot ever since the Bible-bangers of the 1980s were panicking over “secular humanism.” Remember when Texas Republicans wanted to literally ban critical thinking?

New had a whole LOT to panic about to Starnes, all of it pure hooey, and he copied it all down, the entire pile of straw men stumbling down slippery slopes. He credited Moms For Not Recognizing Satire for being 100 percent accurate in predicting that “once you allow clubs that sexualize kids to meet on school property, the next step would be to welcome satanists.”

Here, Starnes means things like Gay-Straight Alliances or other LGBTQ+ clubs, because just having a sexual orientation at all makes you a sex pervert. But since the Temple isn’t really Satanist, we guess that means that LGBTQ+ clubs aren’t really “sexualizing” anyone. Thanks, Todd!

New also warned Starnes that “The forces of darkness are creeping in because we have allowed them to,” which certainly sounds scary, especially since she followed that with a call to make school board elections openly partisan, giving up on the nominal nonpartisanship of the institutions.

“This is what happens when you allow Democrats to take over the schools,” she told KWAM. “We need to turn it around, get back to the basics and bring moral decency into our schools and communities.”

Clearly, the only way to save schools from literal Satan is to purge Democrats, who of course serve The Prince of Lies. Worse, they think it’s funny that anyone would believe in a literal red man with a pitchfork and horns, which as we all know from Chick Tracts is the first step on the way to reading Harry Potter and playing D&D.

Now the next step may be for outraged parents and people who don’t know what “a literary figure” means to demand the school cancel the club. That’s only likely to happen if the school district hasn’t paid any attention to the news, or has really crappy lawyers. Just last month, the Satanic Temple reached a settlement with a school district in Pennsylvania that tried to ban an After School Satan club. The district agreed to pay the Temple’s legal bills, to the tune of $200,000.

But since the district’s Good News Club now appears to be inactive, a spokesperson for the After School Satan Clubs said, there’s no need to bring back the Satanic alternative. For now.

---

Oh Fiddlesticks. The Satanic Christmas Tree Has Come To Attack The Christians.

Oh No! Vengeful Republicans Are Gonna Tear Down Our Precious Satanic Statues That Don't Exist!

Fox News All Het Up About Satan Again

Is Jack Chick In Hell?

Derp Roundup: Special Christmas Edition

---

[KWAM Radio / AP / Memphis Commercial Appeal / Image created using DreamStudio AI, based on this goofy thing from the internet a million years ago.]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations! If you can afford to subscribe, you could help us reach our goal of 5,000 paid subscribers! Or if a one-time donation fits your budget gooder, here is a button to let you do one of those!

And if you’re shopping at Amazon anyway — for science lessons or other Satanic paraphernalia — this portal gives Yr Wonkette a wafer-thin slice of any purchases.