Scottsdale bars Satanic prayer at meeting
The city of Scottsdale will bar the Satanic Temple from leading a scheduled prayer at a City Council meeting in July, city officials announced this week.
Scottsdale informed the Satanic Temple’s Arizona chapter, which is based in Tucson, that only “representatives from institutions that have a substantial connection to the Scottsdale community” will be allowed to give the invocation, city spokesman Kelly Corsette said in an email Monday.
The temple started a firestorm earlier this winter with its request to give an invocation at various city council meetings in Arizona such as Phoenix, Chandler and Tucson. After being rejected in Phoenix, the Scottsdale City Council originally accepted the request. But thousands of emails filled Scottsdale officials’ inboxes over the prayer issue, and religious groups were preparing to organize in protest.
The city is making other arrangements for the July 6 invocation, Corsette said.
Satanic Temple spokesman Stu de Haan said the city has “pulled the rug out from under us” after twice approving plans for the invocation — first for April 5 and then for July 6 when the group had to reschedule for logistical reasons.
“Here at the last minute they decided to make up or construct some reason or pretext not to have us speak,” de Haan said. “They had to have made it up, because why would they approve us in the first place then?”
De Haan learned about Scottsdale’s decision Monday afternoon and said it was too early to say what the group might do next.
The Satanic Temple had planned to urge Scottsdale listeners to embrace a “Luciferian impulse” before closing the prayer with “hail Satan,” according to a draft obtained by
The Arizona Republic in March. The group promotes religious agnosticism and does not believe in the supernatural.
Arizona chapter member Michelle Shortt planned to ask the audience to “reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things” while standing firm “against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens” personal sovereignty.