A legal decision in Oklahoma to bar a Ten Commandments monument from its statehouse has a group of Satanists seeking a new home for a huge horned-goat statue of Satan.
In fact, the Satanic Temple is now looking for a friend of the devil in Arkansas, and it plans to reveal the 8 1/2 foot tall statue in Detroit later this month.
In late June, the Oklahoma Supreme Court said that its state constitution prevented governments from taking any act to benefit a religion, and the Ten Commandments monument at the Capitol had obvious religious overtones.
The Satanic Temple had planned since 2013 to have a monument to Satan built and installed in Oklahoma City to sit near the Ten Commandments monument, which was installed in 2012 and paid for with private funds. But before the Temple and the state could tackle the Satan monument issue, the ACLU sued about the Ten Commandments monument, which led the state to put all future monuments on hold.
When the Ten Commandments monument decision was announced on June 30, the Temple initially praised the state Court’s move.
“The entire point of our effort was to offer a monument that would complement and contrast the 10 Commandments, reaffirming that we live in a nation that respects plurality, a nation that refuses to allow a single viewpoint to co-opt the power and authority of government institutions,” spokesman Lucien Greaves said in an email to the Washington Post. “Given the Court’s ruling, TST no longer has any interest in pursuing placement of the Baphomet monument on Oklahoma’s Capitol grounds.”
But now, the project is near completion and the statue, reportedly cost more than $100,000, will have a public debut in Detroit before the Temple finds a suitable location at a government-related site.
“It was always our intention to take this wherever it was relevant, wherever it was necessary, and wherever that dialogue needed to take place,” Greaves told the Associated Press.
And that destination could be Arkansas. In April 2015, Governor Asa Hutchinson signed a bill allowing a privately funded Ten Commandments monument in Little Rock. The bill made it clear that monument was a historical tribute.
“The placing of a monument to the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol would help the people of the United States and of the State of Arkansas to know the Ten Commandments as the moral foundation of the law,” the bill said.
That distinction is important. A 2004 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Van Orden v. Perry held that Texas could keep its Ten Commandments monument because of its historical meaning and the location at the state capitol didn’t violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. But the Court also ruled in a 2005 case, McCreary County v. ACLU, that two Ten Commandments displays in Kentucky violated the Establishment Clause because their purpose was to advance religion.
Greaves told the AP that his group would decide at a later time if it would pursue moving the Satan monument to Arkansas. However, the battle over the Ten Commandments monument in Oklahoma is far from over.
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin said this week the monument will stay in Oklahoma City while the state government asks for a re-hearing and lawmakers draft language for a proposed state constitutional amendment to allow the monument to remain at the capitol.
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