The Satanic Temple encouraged supporters Thursday to order Satanic cakes from bakers that religiously object to serving same-sex weddings.
The temple launched the initiative in light of the upcoming Supreme Court case concerning the rights of Jack Phillips, the Christian baker that refused to make a wedding cake for a gay marriage, according to a news release that the Satanic Temple provided to The Daily Caller News Foundation. Representatives of the temple said that if bakers do not wish to make cakes for gay weddings, temple members will force them to make cakes supporting homosexuality.
“The Satanic Temple (TST) has announced a plan for those who feel alienated or oppressed by the privileged status that religion holds over sexual orientation: Request your homophobic baker make a cake for Satan,” the press release reads.
“Because religion is a protected class, a baker may refuse service to LGBTQ people, but they may not refuse service based upon someone’s religion. If they aren’t willing to make a cake for same-sex unions, let’s have them make a cake to honor Satan instead,” the release adds. (RELATED: Christian Cakeshop Owner Threatened By Gay-Rights Activists)
Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves told TheDCNF that Satanists believe people should be required to act “within accepted social behavior,” and that either religion should lose its status as a protected class, or sexual orientation should become a protected class.
“If evangelical theocratic nationalists want to deny LGBTQ community services, then other people should be allowed to deny them services as well,” Greaves told TheDCNF. “I think that’s a legally tenable option. It’s not a very socially tenable option. We’ve already gone over this in the Jim Crow era, I think we came up with a kind of social contract that if you’re going to run a business and provide services to the public that you need to act within the boundaries of what is within accepted social behavior, regardless of your own religion or whatever else. And now, what we’re really seeing is a push from the evangelical theocrats to hold themselves as not being in equal status but as having a type of super status, a kind of overly privileged and exempt group from the rest of what is accepted social norms.”
LGBT groups have not officially approved or decried the Temple’s cake initiative, but Greaves told TheDCNF that the Temple received a significant positive response from the LGBT community, especially from within Satanic membership.
“A lot of our membership is also homosexual as well, and I feel like there’s obvious reasons for that,” Greaves told TheDCNF. “You know, we’re very into that kind of thing. There’s no issue of tolerance with us. And a lot of people who have grown up gay feel very alienated from traditional religion. So we have a very high population of LGBTQ community also as membership of the Satanic Temple.”
Greaves said he hoped that the initiative would cause people to question why sexual orientation is not a protected class, but “some backwards superstition” is.
“We renounce supernaturalism insofar as truth claims are concerned. We defer to empirical science,” the avowed Satanist told TheDCNF.
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