Earlier this month, a representative of the Satanic Temple of Iowa delivered the invocation before a meeting of the Ottumwa City Council. Predictably, the speech set off a wave of controversy as Christian nationalists voiced their outrage.
Among those voicing such outrage is Christian nationalist political activist and right-wing commentator Mark Meckler, president of the Convention of States Foundation, who used the most recent episode of his "The BattleCry" program to declare that, had he been in the room when the invocation was delivered, he "might have got arrested for assault."
"The city council meeting was opened with a straight up prayer to Satan," Meckler griped. "No one objected. No one intervened. After the fact, somebody said that we should have a moment of silence. Somebody stood up afterwards and said, 'We should absolutely pray against this. We need to overrule this immediately.'"
"I don't know about you, but if I was there and I heard this going on, I'd have jumped [up]," he continued. "I might have tackled the guy, I might have got arrested for assault. I would have started shouting. I would have interrupted the guy. No way, no how. This should not be allowed."
"This is not protected by the First Amendment," Meckler insisted. "This guy ... is a professed Satanist, but he says it's not a religion. He says they don't worship Satan in the traditional sense like worshiping God. They don't fit the definition of a religion. We should absolutely prohibit this type of opening at city council meetings. Anybody who thinks that the framers of the Constitution or the founders of this country would have tolerated this kind of stuff, that when they came up with the First Amendment, they thought, 'It's gonna be great because we're gonna have a bunch of Satan worshipers rising up doing this stuff,' they don't understand the state of the country at that time. There were actually laws against this in all the colonies. All these colonies said this kind of stuff was illegal. It wasn't just that they were opposed to it, they made it illegal and we should not tolerate this in our country."
"We should not allow Satanists to get a toehold at our city council meetings or Congress or anywhere else," Meckler declared. "So if you see this—you, I'm talking to you—you should do something. You should object to it. You should start yelling. Yeah, you should heckle him until he is shut up. This should not be allowed in our seats of government."
