“Lucien Greaves’ ” Patreon post
- Introduction
- Case Background
- The Final Dismissal (in detail)
- The Satanic Temple’s response
Here’s what Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko said about all this on his Patreon, emphasis added:
Last week, we received an infuriating ruling in one of our Religious Reproductive Rights lawsuits in Texas, dismissing our claim as “spare and unusually cryptic,” with Judge Charles Eskridge playing the role of doddering old fool, pretending that his own inability to grasp easily established facts justifies his refusal to adjudicate the claim.
The Judge’s entire dismissal is essentially a thorough examination of our claim performed by a man acting like a child who answers every question by repeatedly asking, “but why?” even when the question is entirely irrelevant. As is typical of non-Christian religious claims, the judge insists that there must be a direct doctrinal mandate explicitly stated to our religious practitioners motivating their every step in the abortion process before our claim has legitimacy. At least, that seems to be what the judge suggests when he states that “[m]uch is left to conjecture” in our claim that establishes the link between our belief in bodily autonomy, the Abortion Ritual, and how the Texas Laws against abortion inhibit our ability to practice our religion as we see fit.
The dismissal is so thoughtless and facile that we have confidence in our appeal, but perhaps more infuriating than the judge’s near-comical feigning of confusion and ignorance is the typical cheers of joy from the anti-TST crowd who desperately cling to any loss of ours as a personal gain for them, even as they claim to support reproductive rights themselves. TST, they love to declare, does not understand the law. This is always stated by individuals who themselves do not understand the law, nor do they have any legal theory background. In fact, when reviewed by experts, our claims are most often adjudged to be firmly grounded and well-argued. Just last week, the New York Times ran a piece highlighting our legal battles, with one expert declaring our reproductive rights litigation “very helpful.”
Those who cheer the unequal treatment that The Satanic Temple receives in the courts very clearly have allowed their distaste for TST to overshadow any dedication they might have had to Reproductive Rights, if they really ever actually cared about the issue at all. To accept a ruling that suggests our tenets need to directly advocate for abortion and name the specific conditions for the procedure – in a time in which Christian claims make no credible reference to Biblical proscriptions at all (ie a high school coach’s claim that he needs to pray at the 50 yard line during a game, or a web designer who claims that her religion prevents her from dumping any gay content into a template) – is to accept and welcome Christian supremacy.
So, a couple of things.
It’s pretty comically foolish to refer to the presiding judge as a “doddering old fool,” although in fairness, it’s perfectly in keeping with the way that TST refers to the various other judges who rule against them around the country. It can’t be something The Satanic Temple is doing; it must be the “nasty corrupt judges”, as a certain former president might say.
This appeal is going to the Fifth Circuit, which is famously the most batshit reactionary appeals court in the entire nation. If The Satanic Temple were to somehow prevail there, it’s a pretty safe bet that it would not be on the basis of legal reasoning that would protect anyone else from Christian nationalism in any other context.
After all, TST is also appealing the dismissal of its SLAPP in the Ninth Circuit, attempting to establish precedent that would allow churches to sue anyone who criticized a religion’s tenets, regardless of existing defamation law or the separation of church and state. But no one in their right mind would argue that secularism is being protected by fundamentalist churches having an extra vector of wielding state power against the people they want to exterminate — secularists would probably make exactly the opposite argument, actually, and rightly wonder why TST’s priorities here exclude taking that into account.
Moreover, whether or not TST’s legal strategy regarding challenging abortion bans is actually “extremely helpful” is up for debate.
In the New York Times article Misicko linked in his Patreon, TST got one favorable quote in particular to crow about:
Marci Hamilton, a religious freedom expert at the University of Pennsylvania who represents clergy in abortion rights lawsuits in Florida, called the temple’s lawsuits “extremely helpful.”
“They are saying, OK, courts, if you’re going to favor the religious right, we’re going to show you a faith whose rights are being violated,” she added.
Well, we’d love to get Hamilton’s opinion on TST’s regard for protecting religious freedom when it comes to their SLAPP suits, for instance. But TST didn’t invent that strategy and many other religions have specifically protected the right to an abortion for decades and centuries longer than the Temple has ever existed — or bothered to have a stance against abortion. We also think that it bears pointing out that however helpful that strategy might be as a template for other religions, it’s hard not to notice TST’s conspicuous absence as a party to the lawsuits brought by those other religions ostensibly following in TST’s footsteps. This is especially true in Indiana, a state where TST is not only suing as well but where an injunction on enforcing abortion bans was successfully granted to an interfaith coalition.
On one hand, you can reasonably say that TST has the right to determine for itself the best way to challenge abortion restrictions in any given location, regardless of how effective that turns out to be.
On the other hand, it’s just as reasonable to conclude, even speculatively, that those other plaintiffs looked at how TST actually handles itself, and decided that protecting their right to bodily autonomy was too important to let it be endangered by letting TST get involved here as well.
We get accused sometimes of gloating when The Satanic Temple fails, but that’s not really accurate. It’s more like, “That thing we said wouldn’t and couldn’t work didn’t work, so please stop supporting these dipshit owners and lining their pockets.”
This is all the more urgent given that TST actively markets itself to the general public as though it has already successfully secured a religious exemption – a blatant falsehood that capitalizes on ignoring the critical differences between state and federal laws, and obscures the current absence of any such precedent that would allow such an exemption to exist. And, thanks to TST’s other lawsuit against Lamar Advertising, we know that Doug and Cevin were, and are, fully aware that no such precedent existed prior to their pretending otherwise for the express purpose of catfishing prospective clients to represent.
TST’s posturing as though it already has an exemption, and its pretense that utilizing this exemption is as straightforward as crowdfunding an indeterminate number of failed lawsuits until it stumbles on both a judge and an appeal panel that agree, jeopardizes the lives of abortion seekers in red states everywhere by encouraging them to put themselves at risk of police and domestic violence, in the uncertain hope that TST will successfully represent them when it has failed to do so for anyone else, anywhere else. You would never know that TST took this immediate risk to the lives of its followers seriously by reading any of its actual claims in court anywhere in the country.
TST has no confidence in its own arguments in court, because those arguments aren’t intended to do anything but simply exist to be fundraised off of and pointed at vaguely as “proof” that “at least TST is doing something” – a resoundingly offensive rebuttal and overt admission from whoever uses it that they have never seriously engaged with the risks incurred by abortion funds all around the country on a daily basis, in particular in the Deep South.
It beggars belief to say that a court motion where nearly half the text is a five-act play comprised of Venn diagrams was filed in the sincere belief that it would be a compelling legal argument worth however many thousands of dollars it cost to produce.
Doug is perfectly content to go on Patreon and fire off any number of childish insults at the presiding judge as a “rebuttal,” but the fact is that he didn’t even link the docket directly so that his supporters could see the arguments that their countless donations and volunteer hours have gone towards making possible. He opted instead to link a Bloomberg Law article – which is to say, behind a paywall for a service designed for legal professionals, inherently out of reach of lay consumers that are TST’s target demographic – and an NYT puff piece that engages not at all with TST’s actual courtroom history or the arguments TST made in Hellerstedt in particular (and which in fact had been published almost a week before the Hellerstedt ruling at all).
That’s how little confidence he has in his religion’s own legal arguments’ ability to do what they supposedly exist for.
That’s how little regard he has for his followers or for the issues that draw so many of them to TST to begin with.
TST’s defeat at Hellerstedt is but the latest example of why TST is fundamentally incapable of posing any meaningful challenge to the Christian Right, and actively commits its resources to maintaining both that inability and a public charade pretending otherwise. This is simply what TST is built to do, and what it will keep doing for as long as there are people naive or desperate enough to take them at their word.
TST’s sales pitch about being “the last line of defense” is unadulterated snake oil that collapses immediately on any amount of scrutiny into their public record, with any amount of sober-minded understanding of the history of how civil rights are actually established or defended. This narrative is actively dangerous to anyone who takes it seriously enough to support TST at any level, and TST spends an untold amount of additional resources building legal arguments explicitly meant to silence those who might expose that threat publicly. This is what The Satanic Temple’s priorities are, because that is what The Satanic Temple is – a predatory and abusive organization that banks its legitimacy as a religion on the extent to which it is able to marginalize other people in turn, and prevent that from coming to light however it deems fit. TST is not a rebuttal of Christian theocracy, but rather an extension of it: the project of two otherwise wholly mediocre white men trying to appropriate that theocracy for themselves.
And as always, it’s never been just us saying this. Doug and Cevin’s grift has been explicitly recognized as such by people much smarter than we are, and who have been invested in reproductive justice for much longer than TST has ever existed. Instead of buying another round of Doug and Cevin’s snake oil, you should listen to those people instead.
All we’re doing is pointing out what they already know: The Satanic Temple is a threat to reproductive and religious freedom alike, and must be stopped.