In Time For Halloween Satanists Get Had By Small Town Coucil Whine That Their Priciples Cost Them A Bundle On Their Ugly Stunt Prop

WHILE I WOULD TEND to be on the side of a group that opposes any governmental entity getting involved in what might imply the establishment of any religion - religion would eventually come out the worse for it - I had to chuckle when I read about this on Hemant's "friendly"hate blog, of all places, when I found out the quite small town of Belle Plaine (population 7,090) got the better of the publicity-seeking atheists of The Satanic Temple by giving them what they claimed to have wanted.  Here's a non-whiny description of what happened:

The battle began about four years ago after a monument was installed at Veterans Memorial Park depicting a soldier's silhouette kneeling by a fallen comrade's cross-shaped grave marker. The monument garnered complaints for its religious overtones.

The city then took the memorial down, but new protests prompted Belle Plaine  to create a free-speech area in the park and put it back up. The Satanic Temple commissioned a monument of a black cube with pentagram inscriptions and an upturned helmet on the top to be displayed as a counterpoint.

It was to be the first Satanic Temple monument on public property in the country, but Belle Plaine leaders canceled the free-speech zone — a "limited public forum" — after repeated protests by religious groups and free speech advocates and revoked the temple's permit. The statue of the soldier, who some called "Joe," came down.

The Satanic Temple sued the city in 2019, asserting that its rights were violated by the city revocation of the permit. Temple officials said they had paid to have the monument built and that its value was about $35,000.

The temple, which has chapters around the world and one in Minnesota, says its members don't actually worship Satan but advocate for a distinct separation of church and state.

In August 2020, a federal court dismissed nine of the 10 counts in the Satanic Temple's suit, including several alleging free speech and free exercise of religion violations. The lawsuit's remaining count alleged that the city broke a promise when it revoked the permit.

The "promissory estoppel" claim required the temple to prove that the city made a "clear and definite promise" to the Satanic Temple, that the city intended the temple to rely on the promise, that the temple did so with negative results and that the promise must be kept to "prevent an injustice."

The judge found that Belle Plaine made a promise but said the temple didn't rely on it because the group had contacted an artist to make the monument before receiving a permit.

Belle Plaine fulfilled its promise, the judge said, since the city never promised to reimburse the temple and the temple received ample donations to fund the monument. The temple didn't make a "compelling case" that its reputation was hurt or that the monument isn't fulfilling its purpose because it's not displayed in Belle Plaine, the judgment said.

Since the temple wasn't financially hurt and there was no loss of reputation, enforcing the promise isn't necessary, according to the order.

The judge also agreed with the city's request to penalize the temple for filing a second lawsuit that echoed claims that already had been dismissed in the first case.

The judge ruled that the temple should pay the city's legal fees for the second suit, which was dismissed, as a penalty. The legal fees still are being determined.

And now the atheist-Satanists (apparently these particular ones are from Massachusetts, not even in the same state as Belle Plaine) are whining that it cost them money to mount their publicity stunt and that they're not getting their way.  Which is funny because they got their way, or what they claimed was their way.  It's kind of funny, considering that they are also whining that the judge noted they are an anti-religious outfit, which they are, while whining that they're a religious outfit.  

That was especially gratifying to me because if there's one thing atheists hate in my experience it is when someone points out that atheism is a religious ideology.  They really whine when someone points out that they're always creating gods in the way I pointed out just the other day, material gods not unlike the old European pagan gods, demiurges, etc. only they deny that's what they're doing as they shove those gods into gaps into the current holdings of science, not infrequently to prevent things like the improbability of our intelligent-life-containing universe leading people to believing in God as a rational conclusion.  Of course the issue at the heart of the Satanic Temple's whining is that most popular of all atheist gods (and not with a few others) Mammon, money, the almighty Doll-ah! 

I'll leave it to you to go follow the atheist whining on this. One of the funniest things is the way they're whining about the judge who issued the decision, Wilhelmina Wright, an Obama appointee who was supported in her appointment by both Senator Amy Klobuchar and the great Senator Al Franken. The idiot geniuses of Hemant's blog community seem to believe she's a right-wing Republican.

I'll give you this much of Hemant's whiny post on it:

Rather than have a Satanic monument go up, they promised to remove the Christian monument.

That was all well and good in regards to the First Amendment.  But that didn't mean all the problems were resolved because The Satanic Temple now has this giant black expensive steel monument sitting in a facility.  They commissioned it with the intention of putting it up in the park, but that was no longer going to happen because city officials shut down the public forum.

So what were they supposed to do with it?

Hey, maybe they can get the Center For Inquiry to display it on one of their properties, or the Freedom From Religion Foundation heads would put it on their lawn or something (assuming they've got one).  Maybe one of the richer atheists would like it in their collection.  If the idiots paid $35,000 on the prop for their publicity stunt - reportedly funded through donations - it must be worth that much to one of their faithless faithful.  

I guess it didn't occur to the big-brains (atheists are always telling us how much smarter they are) at the atheist outfit that if it were put on public property in the park that a religious group could have sued for it violating the separation of church and state and the idiots would still have the thing on their hands with removal costs thrown in, besides.   They should have gone through court before paying for the hideous prop.  I'd have hired a better artist, that thing is plug ugly.

Update:  The Satanic Temple's use of a town that size to mount one of its publicity legal cases is not an insignificant thing for a town council to have to deal with.  Especially when they're an out-of-state, tax-exempt outfit and the town would have to pay legal costs out of local taxes.   I would bet that they'd rather have been shut of the entire thing but they also have to contend with what locals want, even if what they want is bound to lead to this kind of headache.  

This isn't an important issue for the real left, fighting over stupid stuff like this while Republican-fascists are using the idiocy over things like this to destroy democracy and prevent equality is more important than placating whiny atheists and others.  The left should get shut of them and their counter-productive obsession.