BOSTON (CN) — The Boston City Council can refuse to allow a group of Satanists to join the ministers and other religious leaders who offer invocations at its meetings, a three-judge panel of the First Circuit held in an opinion issued late on Tuesday, finding such action does not violate the establishment clause.
“Speakers were invited based on their contributions to the councilors' districts and to the Boston community,” the court said, adding that the plaintiff Satanist group “has not shown that any of the Boston city councilors have chosen invocation speakers based on the councilors' own religious preferences or biases or barred potential speakers from delivering invocations that oppose the councilors' religious beliefs.”
The lawsuit was brought by the Satanic Temple, which was founded in 2013 and boasts that it’s the only Satanic organization that’s officially recognized as a religion by the IRS. It doesn’t believe in a literal Satan and operates in a gray area between a community of faith and a spoof of traditional religions, drawing many members from the LGBTQ community.
Last year the group attracted some 800 attendees to SatanCon, a gathering at the Boston Marriott.
The Boston City Council meets about three dozen times a year and typically begins meetings with a prayer, poem, or other introduction, usually from a local religious leader. City councilors have absolute discretion as to whom to invite. From 2016 to 2018 the Satanic Temple repeatedly requested to speak and was rejected.
The invocations date from the 1800s, and for years the city offered speakers a small stipend. But in 2017, the city abolished the payments at the suggestion of then-councilor Michelle Wu, now Boston's mayor.
The Temple claimed the invitations were unconstitutional because they favored some religions over others, but the panel disagreed in a 63-page decision written by U.S. Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch, a Clinton appointee.
Lynch cited precedent from the U.S. U.S. Supreme Court's decisions in Marsh v. Chambers and Town of Greece v. Galloway, noting that the establishment clause must be "interpreted by reference to historical practices and understandings."
Here, she wrote, the city councilors chose speakers based not on religion but on community service, which was an acceptable criterion. The Temple “has simply not shown evidence of discrimination based on religious beliefs as to which speakers are invited,” she said.
The Temple argued that it also performed charitable work, including Warmer Than Hell, a clothing drive for homeless people, and Menstruatin' with Satan, a program that collects tampons for a women’s shelter. But the court said the councilors could legitimately find that other groups made a bigger difference in the community.
Lynch also rejected the argument that speaker invitations should encourage a diversity of viewpoints. “A selection process should not seek to promote a diversity of religious views,” she said, because that would require the city “to make wholly inappropriate judgments about the number of religions it should sponsor and the relative frequency with which it should sponsor each, a form of government entanglement with religion that is far more troublesome.”
Chief U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron said in a concurring opinion that while community service was an acceptable criterion, some other arguments put forward by the city were constitutionally questionable, including that councilors could favor religious leaders they knew personally and that they could invite speakers based on whether it would help them politically.
“We have a Bill of Rights because — in a constitutional democracy — majority rule is sometimes the problem rather than the solution,” the Obama appointee wrote. He warned that choosing speakers based on political considerations “necessarily tends to favor those religious views that have the most adherents or that are least likely to be controversial in the eyes of the majority.”
U.S. Circuit Judge William Kayatta, an Obama appointee, also presided on the panel.
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