And yet another reason people need to think twice about demanding things religious

Satanic Prayer May Open Florida Town Council Meeting

The Huffington Post  | by  Yasmine Hafiz

 

05/09/2014 12:59 pm EDT  

 

 

 

Just three days after the Supreme Court ruled that sectarian legislative prayer was constitutional in Greece v. Galloway, a man in Deerfield Beach, Florida, requested to open a session of the town council or the Florida State Senate with a Satanic prayer, reports 12 News.

Chaz Stevens, a Satanist, explained:

I just want equal billing. We allow various religious nutjobs to give a prayer. They pray to Jesus who is make-believe, god who is make-believe, why not Satan who is make-believe? Why discriminate against one make-believe god over another? Satan and I are being circumvented. The city of Deerfield Beach has once again declared war on religion — and this time it’s Satanism.

Stevens previously made headlines last December when he successfully put up a secular Festivus pole made of beer cans in the Florida Capitol in protest of a nativity scene that was also displayed there.

His letter to the town council read:

Dear City of Deerfield Beach;
With the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing “prayer before Commission meetings” and seeking the rights granted to others, I hereby am requesting I be allowed to open a Commission meeting praying for my God, my divine spirit, my Dude in Charge.
Be advised, I am a Satanist.
Let me know when this is good for you.

Justice Anthony Kennedy's majority opinion in the case stated, “[t]o hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech," meaning that prayers are allowed to be specific to a person's particular beliefs or traditions.
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Of course, not everyone will be happy if the request is granted. Consider this story from last May:

Juan Mendez, an Arizona State Representative, was asked to give a prayer in the Arizona House.  I don’t think they realized that he was an atheist, and Mendez said this “prayer”:

Most prayers in this room begin with a request to bow your heads. I would like to ask that you not bow your heads. I would like to ask that you take a moment to look around the room at all the men and women here in this moment, sharing this extraordinary experience of being alive, and dedicating ourselves to working toward improving the lives of the people of our state. This is a room in which there are many challenging debates, many moments of tension, of ideological division, of frustration. But this is also a room where, as my secular humanist traditions stress, by the very fact of being human, we have much more in common than we have differences…Let us root our policy-making process in these values that are relevant to all Arizonans, regardless of religious belief or non-belief. In gratitude and in love, in reason and in compassion, let us work together for a better Arizona.

That’s fantastic—much better than religious “prayers”!  Sadly, Mendez’s invocation of humanism peeved his fellow religious legislators, who, of course, not only attacked him but offered a counter-prayer to propitiate God, who was obviously pissed off at Mendez’s atheism (I haven’t been able to find a transcript of the counter-prayer). As the Associated Press reports (reprinted at The Big Story),

Republican Rep. Steve Smith on Wednesday said the prayer offered by Democratic Rep. Juan Mendez of Tempe at the beginning of the previous day’s floor session wasn’t a prayer at all. So he asked other members to join him in a second daily prayer in “repentance,” and about half the 60-member body did so. Both the Arizona House and Senate begin their sessions with a prayer and a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.
“When there’s a time set aside to pray and to pledge, if you are a non-believer, don’t ask for time to pray,” said Smith, of Maricopa. “If you don’t love this nation and want to pledge to it, don’t say I want to lead this body in the pledge, and stand up there and say, ‘you know what, instead of pledging, I love England’ and (sit) down.
“That’s not a pledge, and that wasn’t a prayer, it’s that simple,” Smith said.

But here’s the good news, and remember, it’s from Arizona, where everyone but Mendez and readers Ben Goren and Kelly Houle are religious:

On Wednesday, [Arizona House Speaker] Tobin said he had no problem with Mendez’s prayer.
“From my perspective I didn’t see an issue with Mr. Mendez yesterday,” said Tobin, R-Paulden. “I can appreciate what Mr. Smith was saying, but I think all members are responsible for their own prayerful lives and I think the demonstration that we take moments for prayer we all do collectively and in our own hearts.”
Rep. Jamescita Peshlakai, who represents a northern Arizona district on the Navajo reservation, did take offense. She said Smith’s criticism of another member’s faith, or lack of it, was wrong.
“I want to remind the House and my colleagues and everybody here that several of us here are not Christianized. I’m a traditional Navajo, so I stand here every day and participate in prayers,” even without personally embracing them, said Peshlakai, D-Cameron. “This is the United States, this is America, and we all represent different people … and you need to respect that. Your God is no more powerful than my God. We all come from the same creator.”

Well, the stuff about the “same creator” presupposes a god, but at least Peshlakai noted that not everyone in the legislature is a Christian.