Posted on January 16, 2014
The
Devil’s Due
Satanic
monument is inevitable
by
Daniel Clark
In Oklahoma City, a group calling itself The Satanic Temple
is proposing to erect a statue of Satan in front of the State Capitol. A design they’ve submitted depicts him as a
goat-headed figure with wings, seated on a throne marked with a pentagram, and 
ministering
to two small children.
The Satanic Temple claims a right to do this, based on the presence of a monument of the Ten Commandments on Capitol grounds, which the ACLU is now suing to have removed. It’s not hard to see where this is headed. The ACLU has no constitutional grounds to stand on, but the judiciary will rule in its favor anyway, by rejecting the language of the First Amendment in favor of decades of deliberately erroneous precedent. Therefore, the Satanists will have no reason to proceed with their stunt.
But so what if they went through with it? It’s not as if the Devil doesn’t already hold a place of high honor within our political system. Just ask the devotees of influential Chicago “community organizer” Saul Alinsky, whose 1971 Rules for Radicals has become the how-to book for countercultural, class-warmongering demagogues. Alinsky recognized the influence of his philosophical role model in the following introduction, which appears in that book.
“Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins – or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom – Lucifer.”
In a Playboy interview shortly before his death, Alinsky said he wanted to go to hell so that he could organize the “have-nots” there. “Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short on dough,” he explained. “If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short on virtue.” When asked why he’d want to organize them, he said, “They’re my kind of people.” That goes a long way toward explaining where all the violent criminals, thieves, vandals and public health menaces who comprised the Occupy movement came from, and why the oldest and largest political party in the United States loves them.
Last year in Texas, while the state legislature debated new regulations on abortion clinics, a woman spoke outside the Capitol, relating a cautionary tale about her own abortion. To drown her out, pro-abortion activists started chanting, “Hail Satan! Hail Satan! Hail Satan!” That’s not a slogan with which just any political cause can identify. As heated as the NAFTA debate got, for instance, you never heard the protectionists and free-traders shouting “Hail Satan” at each other. Still, as far as the news and pop media are concerned, abortion advocates are the most mainstream group in all of politics. If you’re not one of them, you’re just not among the people who matter.
What could Satan be telling those children that would be so bad by today’s standards, anyway? He’s probably saying that the values their parents are teaching them are all wrong. Perhaps he’s telling them that gender identity is a matter of individual choice, and exposing them to sexual materials they’re too young to comprehend. Maybe he’s presenting it to them as a matter of scientific fact that the universe, and everything in it, came about by accident, the inescapable conclusions of which are that life has no purpose, and humanity no intrinsic value. How would that differ from the average public school curriculum?
When the children grow up, he may try to discourage and corrupt them, by telling them that they’re permanently trapped in fixed socioeconomic classes, and that the only way anybody gets ahead is by cheating. He’ll probably encourage them to covet the possessions of others, and then elect politicians who promise to take those possessions away. He’ll almost assuredly tell them that the most important thing is their self-fulfillment, and that it’s coincidentally unimportant for their children to grow up with both a mother and a father, but that any one of a number of alternative family structures is more than equally suitable.
When we see the Devil in our political system, he does not appear the way he does in the artist’s rendering of the proposed monument. Nevertheless, he isn’t hard to recognize, nor has he been made particularly unwelcome. So then, what’s so objectionable about the statue, exactly? Is it just that we have a problem with flying goats?
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