Judge: Pa. School District Must Allow After School Satan Club

A federal judge on Monday ordered a Pennsylvania school district to allow the After School Satan Club to use its middle school after previously denying the group’s application.

Judge John Gallagher of U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled in a 37-page opinion the Saucon Valley School District must allow the After School Satan Club, which is sponsored by The Satanic Temple, to meet during the school year on three previously agreed-upon dates at Saucon Valley Middle School.

Gallagher also ruled the district does not have to distribute fliers and parental permission slips to students.

The school district, located about 90 minutes north of Philadelphia, initially allowed the club to use the middle school, but after complaints from parents and community members, including a threat of a mass shooting, and Facebook posts by the club advertising its visit that the district said violated its policy, it withdrew the club’s application, prompting the lawsuit.

“The Satanic Temple, Inc.’s objectors may challenge the sanctity of this controversially named organization, the sanctity of the First Amendment’s protections must prevail,” Gallagher wrote. “Indeed, it is the First Amendment that enumerates our freedoms to practice religion and express our viewpoints on religion and all the topics we consider sacred.”

The After School Satan Club said on its website “proselytization is not our goal, and we’re not interested in converting children to Satanism. After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism, the scientific basis for which we know what we know about the world around us. We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of everlasting other-worldly horrors.”

The Satanic Temple, which claims it does not worship Satan but “our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world — never the reverse,” was represented in the lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia firm Dechert LLP.

“In a victory for free speech and religious freedom, a federal court has ruled that the Saucon Valley School District must allow the After School Satan Club to meet in district facilities,” the ACLU tweeted on Monday.