LANSING, Mich. — The Satanic Temple held a ceremony on the steps of the Michigan capitol building on Saturday to decry what it called the “siren song of the religious right.”
“Hail Comrades. Hail sisters and brothers. Hail Satan,” Director Jex Blackmore said as she opened the gathering, being met with the response of “Hail Satan!”
“We are Satanists,” she said. “We engender moral, spiritual and sexual freedom, personal independence, and insist upon personal choice in all things.”
Blackmore, who recently made headlines for blogging her Thanksgiving Day abortion, spoke against the efforts of Christians to preserve the biblical definition of marriage and to end abortion.
“For too long, we have submitted on knees in servitude to the ministers of shame. Shall we surrender to the siren song of the religious right until she transforms us into beasts?” she asked. “The word of God has been evoked time and time again to justify opposition to the civil rights movement, to squash women’s liberation, and stand in the way of same-sex marriage.”
Blackmore called for Satanists to rise up against what she called a “snare upon our hooves.”
“Let us rise up in celebration of our Satanic nature and cast our chains into the dust of Hell,” she said. “All hail the eternal rebel within all of us. To liberty, humanity and justice. To the Satanic emancipator and end of repressive traditions. Hail Satan.”
But some expressed concern over the gathering as they stood outside of the event holding signs such as “Repent and believe the gospel,” and preached the word of God to attendees.
“We’re a Christian nation. We don’t worship the devil. And I just intended to try and maybe talk to them about Jesus because He’s the answer,” local resident Floyd McDeavitt told local television station WILX.
He said that the nation is headed in the wrong direction.
“When we get to this state here we’ve got to do one of two things,” McDeavitt outlined. “We need to have a revival and get back to our Christian roots, or we’re going to face judgment.”
December 22, 1820, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth Rock, American statesman Daniel Webster spoke of how the Christian faith was the basis upon which the nation was founded.
“Finally, let us not forget the religious character of our origin,” he said. “Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”
“Let us cherish these sentiments, and extend this influence still more widely; in full conviction that this is the happiest society which partakes in the highest degree of the mild and peaceful spirit of Christianity,” Webster declared.
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