A lawsuit against the district documented a clear trail of discrimination against Satanists

Jul 22, 2024

The Satanic Temple has just settled a lawsuit they brought against a school board in Tennessee for violating their rights by discriminating against a proposed After School Satan Club.

The end result? Total capitulation from the Memphis-Shelby County Schools and a payout of over $15,000 to the attorneys who worked with the Satanists. It’s especially satisfying give how much resistance the administration put up against what should have been a simple request.

The lawsuit stems back to a club the Satanists wanted to launch earlier this year. This particular After School Satan Club was slated to begin at Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova—not far from Memphis—this past January. But over the next few months, it became clear that the school wasn’t treating that group the same way it does other religious clubs.

Remember that these ASS Clubs do not promote Satan, Satanic beliefs, Satanism, or anything else like it. The Satanic Temple, which sponsors these groups, doesn’t even believe in a literal Satan. They aren’t interested in indoctrination. Rather, the Satanists “focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us.” It’s like a science club with a devilish twist.

(Follow above article link to view original article with photos/PDFs.)

There aren’t many of these groups to begin with—only four, including one in Pennsylvania where opposition to it led to a lawsuit that culminated in a settlement forcing the district to pay the Satanists over $200,000 in legal fees. The limited number of clubs is largely because The Satanic Temple isn’t trying to start them from scratch; they only come about in response to (Christian) Good News Clubs—and, even then, only when parents request it. That demand is why The Satanic Temple was launching this one:

[The Satanic Temple] claims that the parents of 13 children at Chimneyrock Elementary had signed permission slips for the first After School Satan Club meeting there on Jan. 10. 

In December, the New York Times reported that they couldn’t “find a parent who signed a slip who was willing to be identified on the record,” but given the backlash this group often inspires, I wouldn’t want to put my family in danger by going public about signing my kids up for this either. Everything that involves The Satanic Temple, it seems, becomes controversial because conservative Christians simply can’t handle sharing space with people they don’t like even when the Satanists are playing by their rules.

You could tell Christians couldn’t handle it by looking at the responses in Tennessee, where critics couldn’t figure out any legal way to keep The Satanic Temple out... but still, idiotically, made their desires clear in the media.

They literally held a whole damn press conference about it. School board chair Althea Greene said at that conference that “Satan has no room in this district” before quoting from the Bible. She later referred to The Satanic Temple and the After School Satan Club as the “enemy.”

It’s not like dissent was completely absent, though. There were district officials who knew the law was on the Satanists’ side.

The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Toni Williams, said at a news conference with Christian pastors on Wednesday that she was “duty bound to uphold board policies, state laws and the Constitution.”

“But let’s not be fooled,” she said. “Let’s not be fooled by what we have seen in the past 24 hours, which is an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.” 

Literally no one was demanding the district cancel all after-school activities. But Williams was right to say that the only way to block the ASS Club from meeting was to stop all extracurricular groups completely. It was only the protesters and district officials, though, who were considering that option.

Williams wasn’t alone in thinking there was a legal way out of this:

School board member Mauricio Calvo, who represents the district that contains Chimneyrock, said the board would explore legal alternatives to “mitigate the situation.”

There were no legal alternatives besides shutting down all extracurricular activities, and there was no “situation” to “mitigate.” Everything was fine as is. The Satanists just wanted the same access to students and the building that Christians had. (See? Simple.)

Calvo later added, “Just because a law is the law we don’t have to accept it.” (Yes they do. That’s why it’s the law.)

No matter how many complaints there were, though, this particular After School Satan Club was scheduled to launch on January 10. There was no guarantee there would be additional meetings either. A poster on Facebook listed all future monthly meetings as “pending.”

It turned out that hosting the first meeting was incredibly difficult behind the scenes. It only got worse afterwards. More importantly, the Satanists became more certain they were being treated differently from the Good News Club.

That’s why they decided to sue.

The lawsuit, filed by the Freedom From Religion Foundation on behalf of The Satanic Temple in a federal district court in March, said that the Shelby County Board of Education (which oversees the MSCS) had violated the Satanists’ First Amendment rights.

… The district has charged The Satanic Temple discriminatory rental and security fees, refused to adequately communicate, and generally treated members of the educational group as second-class citizens.

Memphis-Shelby County Schools [MSCS] “cannot pick and choose how much it charges an organization renting its facilities based on how much it does or does not favor the organization’s viewpoint, the content of its speech, or its religious beliefs,” asserts FFRF’s lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee. The district’s “unconstitutional behavior has chilled The Satanic Temple’s speech and substantially burdened its ability to exercise its religiously motivated practice of offering inclusive, welcoming religious clubs at public schools.”

The lawsuit listed a number of damning allegations. Among the claims:

The district kept the ASS Club’s application for space “pending” for over a month, making their first scheduled meeting in December a non-starter.

The district refused to pass out permission slips for After School Satan, claiming they couldn’t do that for third parties… even though they had done that for the Good News Club and even though the Satanists’ forms didn’t violate any district policies.

For the first meeting in January, the district charged The Satanic Temple an outrageous $2,045.60 “special security fee” (for ten police officers for four hours on the day of the meeting) and $250 for “field lights.” If the Satanists didn’t pay up, the district told them, they couldn’t meet. (The Good News Club was never assessed either of these charges.) The Satanists paid the cost. At that first meeting, on January 10, the Satanists said they only saw three security officers on site. Furthermore, there didn’t appear to be any “field lights” turned on.

After weeks of not replying to The Satanic Temple’s emails, the February meeting was moved by the district to a new location and the Satanists were told all future meetings would have to be held at 5:00pm (hardly after school!) to “allow time for the student dismissal process.” Then, just before the February meeting occurred, its start time was also changed by the district, forcing the Satanists “to arrange thirty minutes of child care from 4:30 to 5:00 p.m. for attendees.” There’s no evidence that the Good News Club was ever forced to make similar adjustments.

Despite the district canceling the future ASSC meetings in the reservation system, they still charged the Satanists $30-per-meeting insurance fees that were non-refundable.

In response to a records request for how much the district was charging the Good News Club to meet after school, the district (eventually) said that they were “not in possession of any public records” documenting those fees. The implication was obvious: Christians were not being charged to rent out meeting rooms, but the Satanists were being price-gouged for the same requests.

The bottom line was that the school district sure as hell seemed to be treating the Satanist group differently from the Christian group, all in an effort to get them to go away.

Since November 2023, MSCS has refused to treat the Satanic Temple equal to other groups. MSCS continues to treat the Temple as a second-class citizen in an attempt to effectuate an unconstitutional heckler’s veto, bowing to internal and community hostility toward the Satanic Temple on the basis of its viewpoint, the content of its speech, and its religious beliefs…

Given the events of the past four plus months, MSCS has shown a continuous custom, policy, and practice of attempting to constructively block and deter the ASSC from meeting at Chimneyrock Elementary.

…

Over the preceding four-plus months, MSCS has demonstrated a widespread custom and practice of unnecessarily delaying approval or denial of the Satanic Temple’s rental applications, refusing to effectively communicate with the Satanic Temple, charging the Satanic Temple discriminatory rental rates and security fees, and unilaterally canceling the Temple’s rental applications.

It was appalling how overt the discrimination by district officials seemed to be toward the Satanists. The lawsuit documented email after email sent to the district, requesting basic information about the status of the Satanists’ reservations—emails which never received any responses. Furthermore, the costs for the meetings appeared to be made up as the district went along. When refunds were given, they were never explained. Couple that with the open hostility district officials gave when speaking about the club, and there wasn’t any question that the district was breaking the law.

All the Satanists were asking for was equal treatment. All the district had to do was say, “Sure.” They refused to do so, despite all the opportunities they were given, and it was only now, after many months, that the Satanists were suing them.

It was a long time coming.

FFRF summarized the case this way:

The district has since Jan. 10 continued attempts to thwart The Satanic Temple and deter its club for students from meeting at Chimneyrock. The district has abruptly changed the meeting time, unceremoniously canceled rental applications, refused to communicate with the Temple regarding rental rates, and continued to treat the Temple unfavorably. It’s clear that such illegal tactics are fueled by hostility toward The Satanic Temple’s speech, viewpoint and religion by school board members, administrators and other officials. 

Incidentally, in March, the Satanists held a meeting before school, presumably to avoid all the chaos after school. I asked June Everett, the director of The Satanic Temple’s ASSC program, how that went and her answer was indicative of how poorly they’d been treated by this district over the previous several months. She gave me this rundown by email:

They stuck us in a "portable classroom" that was guarded.  They threw up a screen so that nobody could see us, and stuck us at the end of a hallway that leads to the library that was not occupied… They were interrupted by the band class who came to grab their music stands where they were being stored.

    She also told me the district had “not approved our April or May BSSC meetings.”

The simple truth was that if a Christian club was treated the same way by a public school district, there would be non-stop headlines about it in right-wing media. And they would have a point! This was blatant religious discrimination yet the district wasn’t offering any reasonable defense for their treatment of the Satanists.

For what it’s worth, the Satanists were only asking for $1 in nominal damages (in addition to any legal fees). This wasn’t about the money. This was about equal treatment under the law. If the people running the Good News Club at the school had any decency, they would have been on the Satanists’ side here, calling on the district to treat other groups the same way they’ve been treated. But that never happened.

Now, however, there’s a resolution.

On July 3, both sides announced they had reached a settlement, but the terms weren’t made public. On Thursday, the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed and FFRF announced the terms of the agreement:

… the Shelby County Board of Education has agreed to make amends in a number of ways.

The board will pay over $15,000 to resolve the suit. That includes $14,845 in attorneys’ fees and costs to FFRF and cooperating counsel. The board will also pay one dollar for nominal damages to The Satanic Temple and $196.71 for various fees previously paid by the Temple in connection with rental reservations that had not yet been refunded.

Further, the Shelby County Board of Education has agreed not to discriminate against the organization with regard to its requests to rent and use school board property at Chimneyrock Elementary School; the Temple will be subject to the same rules and requirements as other nonprofit organizations seeking to rent or use the school’s facilities. In addition, the school board’s administration has promised not to hold any press conference with regard to the Temple’s lawful rental or use of school property.

June Everett told me over the weekend that TST has also been reimbursed for the “special security fee” assessment (roughly $2,000) and the field lights ($250) as well as any costs they spent on renting the facility.

It didn’t have to be this way, she insisted. The district “had multiple opportunities” to follow the law but chose, instead, to “ignore us, charge us outrageous fees, and treat our volunteers and families with blatant incivility.”

It’s hard to imagine how that could’ve gone any better for the Satanists or any worse for the district. Everything The Satanic Temple and FFRF warned the district about—only to be ignored—came to pass. District attorneys must have known that. They had to know they weren’t going to come out of this looking good. They had to know a judge or jury would never side with them. So they chose to take a deal that doesn’t officially label them “losers”… even though they conceded on everything of substance.

All of it could have been avoided if district officials simply listened to the people warning them that they were violating the law.

As of this writing, the district hasn’t made any public statement about the settlement. Far from a press conference, it looks like they’ve finally learned to keep their ignorant mouths shut.

When I asked Everett if After School Satan Club would be re-launching in the new school year, she proudly told me, “Oh hell yes.” But, she added, that’s only assuming the Good News Club continues meeting. The ASS Club will only exist as an alternative to the Christian club; it won’t continue if it’s not needed for that single purpose.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)