NO APPARENT BOUNDARIES IN KENAI PRAYER POLICY
The Kenai Borough Assembly may have gone to hell in a handbasket this week, when it allowed a member of the Satanic Temple to offer the invocation before the regular meeting.
Iris Fontana, who is a registered Democrat and an alleged follower of an organization known as the Satanic Temple, appealed to the Assembly to “embrace the luciferian impulse to eat of the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting dillusion of old. Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things.” She ended her statement with “It is done. Hail Satan.”
The entire invocation, which is less than spellbinding, is found at http://bit.ly/2aJDmpd.
An Iris Fontana in 2014 was a psychology at Kenai Peninsula College. She started a GoFundMe page and raised money to travel to China on an apparent learning excursion, with major donations from local civic organizations, including orders of the Eagles and Elks.
Assembly President Blaine Gilman, a Republican, had allowed Fontana to offer the Satanic verses. Most members of the Assembly stood respectfully during the statement, while one member is reported to have left the room.
Other cities across the country have ended the practice of opening meetings with prayer as Satanists have started trolling the meetings to insist on prayer parity.
The City Council of Phoenix, Arizona, for example, ended the prayers earlier this year after members of the Satanic Temple insisted on inclusion. The council has moved to having a moment of silence.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Town of Greece v. Galloway that prayer could continue to be a part of the opening of legislative proceedings, but legislative bodies could not discriminate against religions. That opened a loophole that Satanists across the country are exploiting.