It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, December 09, 2022
Editorial: Stonewalling on messy details of 'Fat Leonard' Navy scandal feels like a blatant coverup
Interpol Venezuela Instagram acc/Getty Images North America/TNS
When law enforcement agencies keep crucial information about high-profile cases from the public, they often say they must do so to as to not interfere with investigations. Sometimes this can be justified on grounds that providing key details could lead to the exposure of confidential informants. But sometimes it just seems like an excuse for bureaucratic torpor. And sometimes it appears the main reason is to keep embarrassing facts under wraps.
Which brings us to a local case that absolutely feels like the latter. Leonard Francis, the CEO of a company that provided services to U.S. Navy vessels in Asian ports, pleaded guilty in 2015 to bribery and fraud charges in an extraordinarily far-reaching scandal in which he gave Navy officials cash and gifts, including the services of prostitutes, in return for lucrative inside information on ship movements and Navy contracts. "Fat Leonard," as he was widely known, then cooperated in a probe that led to convictions of four former Navy officers on conspiracy and bribery charges earlier this year
But in September, he easily escaped from the lavish local mansion where he had been staying since 2017 — on his own dime — instead of jail as part of a medical furlough. He was caught 16 days later in Venezuela, which may balk at extraditing him. Since then, federal officials have refused to explain — either to Congress or the media — the lack of security at the mansion or the many courtesies they provided the organizer of a vast scam targeting U.S. taxpayers. They also won't explain why they think blanket stonewalling is justified — starting with San Diego federal Judge Janis Sammartino, who oversaw Leonard's inexplicably cushy detention and continues to play a key role in the case. A basic question: How does this serve justice in any way?
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The editorial board operates independently from the U-T newsroom but holds itself to similar ethical standards. We base our editorials and endorsements on reporting, interviews and rigorous debate, and strive for accuracy, fairness and civility in our section. Disagree? Let us know.
Dwindling economic opportunities for China’s youth fuels discontent
Author: Kevin Lin, Asian Labour Review
College students and youth had been key participants in a weekend of protests across China against the country’s draconian COVID-19 restrictions at the end of November 2022. This is not surprising. While their political demands for freedom and democracy have been extensively analysed, the economic dimensions of the protests are no less important in understanding what fuels their discontent.
The headlines on China’s economic slowdown do not always illustrate the human impact which has been disproportionally borne by the country’s youth. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s youth unemployment rate — those in urban areas looking for employment between ages 16–25 — climbed to 19.9 per cent in July before falling to 18.7 per cent in August 2022. This was against the overall unemployment rate of around 5 per cent. The youth unemployment rate has been hovering at over 10 per cent for the last few years but this recent spike paints a bleak picture.
Grim statistics do not quite capture the visible feelings of anxiety. The impact of China’s zero-COVID policy for the last three years is not only reflected in national GDP, but also in the layoffs, hiring freezes and disappearing job opportunities for those entering the job market. This zero-COVID policy exacerbates a long-term increase in youth unemployment that reflects structural shifts in China’s economy.
Few would have predicted that China would be failing to create enough new jobs for its youth. Having been the workshop of the world and an economic powerhouse for decades, China has generated a massive number of new jobs across sectors from manufacturing and services to high-paying white-collar jobs. The fact that a fifth of young Chinese are now unable to land a job is a significant reversal of a decades-old trend in strong job creation that brought rising social mobility and prosperity.
The last time China had serious unemployment issues was the 1990s, during a particularly painful period of economic reforms. As China’s state enterprises were restructured and privatised, tens of millions of mostly older workers were laid off. This caused social dislocation and massive protests — something any government wishes to avoid. Since then, especially for young workers, the labour market has more often faced shortages than a lack of employment opportunities.
But in recent years, as labour-intensive manufacturing is relocated out of China, and with the government promoting industrial upgrading and automation, the service sector has not sufficiently absorbed workers who have left their manufacturing jobs. Regulatory crackdowns on tech companies have also dampened hiring for university graduates.
The government has recognised this urgency and announced measures at national and local levels to support youth employment. Credit subsidies for unemployed workers, skills training for manufacturing workers and incentives for young people to create their own start-ups can all be somewhat helpful. But how much these measures alone can reverse structural youth unemployment remains unclear.
Youth unemployment can be better understood in relation to a host of job-related issues that constitute a crisis of work. On top of the quantity of jobs, a challenge is also the failed promise of jobs. An expanded conceptualisation of youth employment allows one to see the multifaceted problems facing Chinese youth.
One dimension of this crisis of work is that jobs are often insecure. Some flexibility may be useful, but too much of it produces anxiety. This is the case with jobs created in the service sector and by the burgeoning platform economy as well as increasingly previously highly secure white-collar jobs. More and more workers, especially those with university degrees, opt to compete for civil service jobs. These used to be frowned upon by young people but are now seen as more secure and more attractive.
A second dimension of this crisis is disillusionment. Young people have spoken out about feeling burnout from their work. The issue is not only long working hours, encapsulated in the infamous ‘996’ regime (work from 9am–9pm, six days a week) popularised by tech workers, but one of feeling unable to move socially upwards. Young workers refer to this as ‘involution’ to illustrate the sense of working harder with fewer rewards. More recently, they speak of ‘lying flat’, ‘letting it rot’ and ‘run’ to show how much they are fed up and willing to give up trying.
While China has not seen the same ‘Great Resignation’ phenomenon during the pandemic as Western countries, China’s youth have become less satisfied with just picking any job. They look for work that provides some degree of security, work-life balance, a path for upward social mobility and for many, meaning. Rising youth unemployment may exacerbate this discontent, limiting options and pushing China’s youth into less desirable work.
Recognising various dimensions of youth discontent over work helps reframe the issue not only in terms of policy solutions, but also in terms of sensitivity towards how China’s youth can feel more hopeful. Addressing these issues may start by empowering workers to have a voice in their workplace, increasing job security at a time of intense economic anxiety and tackling economic inequality.
High levels of youth unemployment and underemployment, combined with disaffection with their jobs, is a recipe for despair and disaffection. Without addressing these concerns in the coming years, China will see a generation of lost youth who may look for disruptive ways to voice their despair.
Kevin Lin is Managing Editor of Asian Labour Review. His research is focused on the development of labour movement, migrant worker organising, labour NGOs and civil society in China.
South Korea’s misogyny problem
Author: Katharine HS Moon, Wellesley College
During the 2022 South Korean presidential race, conservative candidate Yoon Suk-yeol denied that structural inequality between men and women exists and threatened to abolish the Ministry of Family and Gender Equality. He narrowly won the presidency in March 2022 by catering to young men, who overwhelmingly believe that discrimination against men in South Korea is severe.
Yet Korea ranks low in global indexes of gender equality, such as the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report. Incidents of violence against women, including domestic assault, workplace sexual harassment, rape and murder have become alarmingly frequent. In a 2015 study by the South Korean government, 80 per cent of respondents — the vast majority of whom were women — reported they had been sexually harassed in their workplace. Human Rights Watch reported that nearly 80 per cent of male respondents admitted to violent acts against an intimate partner in a 2017 survey.
Women constitute more than half of South Korea’s reported homicide victims — one of the highest gender ratios in the world. In September 2022, a female employee of the Seoul subway system was beaten to death in a subway station restroom by a male co-worker who had stalked and threatened her for three years. Similar deaths occurred in prior years. According to the South Korean Supreme Prosecutor’s Office, 90 per cent of the victims of violent crime in 2019 were women, a significant increase from 71 per cent in 2000.
Digital sex crimes have become an epidemic in one of the most wired nations in the world. Men have set up spy cameras in public bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, stores and subways to film women, distributing the videos online without consent. Less than 4 per cent of sex crime prosecutions involved illegal filming in 2008, but the number rose to 20 per cent in 2017.
Thousands of women’s lives have been impacted, but the prosecution of digital sex crimes and the punishment of convicted perpetrators are notoriously low and lenient. The overwhelming male grip on the police and judicial system — where women comprise only 30 per cent of judges and 4 per cent of police — contributes to the problem.
Young, educated and tech-savvy men have been the main drivers of misogyny and hate speech against women online. They blame women and feminism for their economic and social difficulties in a society distressed by high youth unemployment, spiking housing prices and growing economic inequality. Some of these men have formed the base of the alt-right movement in South Korea, brandishing the conservative flag against women, immigrants, sexual minorities and the disabled. These sentiments have been manipulated by conservative politicians into potent public weapons of battle.
Recent surveys reported that 76 per cent of men in their 20s oppose feminism, in contrast to 64 per cent of women in their 20s who support feminism. Unsurprisingly, almost 60 per cent of respondents in their 20s believed gender issues are the most serious source of conflict in South Korea.
Despite the turbulent anti-woman environment, South Korea’s Constitutional Court recognised women’s right to abortion in 2019 and decriminalised abortion in late 2021. This meant that women who had abortions and medical professionals who administered abortions were no longer subject to fines and jail sentences.
When the Court ruled that the 1953 abortion ban violated pregnant women’s right to self-determination, they were freeing women from decades of state control. From the 1960s to the 1980s, the authoritarian state coerced or forced abortion and sterilisation to lower the population rate in the service of economic development. In the 1980s and 1990s, the state had mostly condoned the abortion of thousands of female foetuses by citizens who favoured male sex selection after prenatal sex screening.
Since the early 2000s, the state has been urging and subsidising women to have more children to reverse South Korea’s demographic crisis — the country with the lowest birth rate in the world. Men have blamed the declining birth rate on women and feminism, a sentiment publicly echoed by President Yoon.
Since the mid-2010s, South Korean women and various civic groups have developed an effective reproductive justice platform that specifies the state, not pro-life advocates, as the enemy of abortion rights. They have staged mass protests, lobbied government ministries and political parties, engaged the media, educated the public and filed amicus briefs in support of decriminalising abortion.
But constitutional promises remain impotent when national laws to protect women’s rights are absent or inadequate. The National Assembly failed to create laws that clarify guidelines for lawful medical abortion by the end of 2020, as mandated by the Constitutional Court in its 2019 decision. This has left medical professionals and women seeking abortion in a legal vacuum with no legislation sanctioning abortion to guide the medical community and health insurance system. Aligning laws with the newly earned constitutional right to abortion is an urgent duty the state needs to fulfil.
The anti-stalking law created in October 2021 also needs to be revised to eliminate loopholes that protect the perpetrator rather than the victim and strengthen enforcement to deter and punish the stalking and killing of women. Otherwise, the misogynistic threats to women and the inadequate legal protections of their bodies and rights will continue to be a fundamental weakness in South Korean democracy.
Katharine HS Moon is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Wellesley College. She is the Kim Koo Visiting Professor at Harvard University and was the inaugural holder of the SK-Korea Foundation Chair and Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.
Predictable as Always, Racists Are Mad About the New ‘The Last of Us’ Posters
Story by Rachel Leishman • Yesterday -
The Mary Sue First of all, people who are racist and sexist but also like The Last of Us are … well … weird. Second, it still isn’t surprising that the sea of “fans” (how are you a fan of something you clearly didn’t understand and learned nothing from?) are being gross about the HBO adaptation and its cast—mainly because it’s not as “white” as they want it to be. Pedro Pascal carrying Nico Parker in the trailer for 'The Last of Us'
Recently, new posters were released for the HBO series that featured characters like Nico Parker’s Sarah front and center. Their release has already ushered in gross commentary on sites like Reddit.
Mainly, these “fans” are mad that Sarah is not a white girl with short blonde hair in a bad outfit. Any kind of logic will get lost in their absolutely bullsh*t explanations as to why Parker isn’t fit for a role that they haven’t yet seen on screen.
“And then they ask why nobody’s watching. Their focus is not on storytelling,” reads one representative comment, simply because Nico Parker is not a white blonde girl.
Again, I reiterate: The show is not out yet. Their anger isn’t coming from a performance but rather that a young and talented Black actress is taking a role they think belongs to someone else. It’s all a personal bias and hatred that is leading this conversation. If these people actually watched Parker’s work, they’d know that she’s incredible and a perfect choice for Sarah, a character you instantly have to care about because we don’t get much time with her.
What their “upset” boils down to is their own racism and they’re projecting it onto their love of a game that they clearly don’t understand! You’re just racist!
There is absolutely no reason why people should be upset over Parker’s casting unless it is for a racist reason. That’s the only explanation. Truly. If you’re mad that Nico Parker is Sarah because it’s not what you envisioned, well get over it. There is no reason for you to not like her. You’ve not seen an episode and now, going into the show, whatever criticism you might have is lost because you let your racism lead the charge and take over.
Parker is very talented and her casting was one that I was very excited about. I think she’ll do a great job opposite Pedro Pascal’s Joel (which the racists are also angry about). But it is sad how predictable it is with genre material. The minute that an actor of color is cast in something that might not have been a character of color originally, the racists come out yelling about how “Hollywood” is “ruining” the game they like.
They’re not ruining anything. It’s called an adaptation. Meaning that it will change and sometimes—often—for the better. I think Parker is fantastic in everything she’s done and at the end of the day, a bunch of angry manbabies are logging online and being racist toward an 18-year-old woman.
The reasoning for their racist hatred is also hiding behind an argument that “Ellie reminds Joel of Sarah but this can’t be the case now,” which is a load of bullocks. The idea is that Joel’s need to protect Ellie and bring her to safety is a reminder of where he failed his own daughter. It’s why Joel’s relationship with Ellie takes a while to grow into the father/daughter dynamic we see later in the game and in The Last of Us: Part II.
But Ellie in the game does not look like Sarah. They’re just both white. So Bella Ramsey doesn’t have to look like Nico Parker in order for the dynamic to work. Those insisting otherwise are just being racist and trying to be the spokesperson for character arcs without actually knowing what they’re talking about.
The Last of Us adaptation has shown us nothing but love for the game it is based on and I can’t wait to see what Nico Parker brings to the role. If the racists want to be mad, they can just not watch the show.
(image: HBO)
First Gen Z Congressman-Elect Has DC Apartment Application Rejected
Maxwell Frost said he lost the apartment and the application fee due to his bad credit rating. WHY DO YOU LOSE YOUR FEE?!
Rep.-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), who will be the first Gen Z member of Congress, said Thursday that his application to rent a Washington, D.C., apartment was rejected due to his bad credit score.
“Just applied to an apartment in DC where I told the guy that my credit was really bad. He said I’d be fine. Got denied, lost the apartment, and the application fee,” Frost tweeted, referencing his work for Uber to make ends meet. “For those asking, I have bad credit cause I ran up a lot of debt running for Congress for a year and a half. Didn’t make enough money from Uber itself to pay for my living.”
Frost told The Washington Post the building where his application was denied was in the Navy Yard neighborhood, located just over a mile from the U.S. Capitol where he’ll soon work.
The median rent for a 1-bedroom apartment in Washington, D.C., is $2,321, according to Zillow.com.
In an October interview with HuffPost, the young Democrat opened up about the financial struggles he faced as a candidate, including how he ran out of money early in his campaign and resorted to driving for Uber to pay his bills.
“As a young person who just doesn’t have a lot of money, I’ve been living literally paycheck to paycheck this entire year and at times didn’t have money to feed myself,” he said.
Frost said there needs to be more poor and working-class candidates in politics to achieve a better democracy.
Rep.-elect Maxwell Alejandro Frost (D-Fla.), the first Gen Z person elected to Congress, said his application to rent a Washington, D.C., apartment was rejected due to his bad credit score. THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES The soon-to-be lawmaker’s struggle to find a home in the nation’s capital is not a new one. In 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who worked as a bartender before her successful campaign for Congress, said she had no cash flow to cover the period between her election and swearing-in.
“I can’t really take a salary,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an interview with The New York Times. “I have three months without a salary before I’m a member of Congress. So, how do I get an apartment? Those things are very real.”
She later noted that it was one of many ways the U.S. electoral system wasn’t designed for working-class leaders.
Frost told the Post he had spoken with Ocasio-Cortez about the housing challenges they faced that many of their colleagues haven’t.
“A lot of the members who come into the Congress don’t have these issues when they move, because they already have money,” Frost told The Washington Post.
Frost also hit out on Twitter at conservatives who were criticizing his dilemma, noting that former President Donald Trump has his own debt issues on a much larger scale. Ocasio-Cortez similarly attracted right-wing derision in 2018 when she spoke about her struggle to afford rent in D.C.
Prior to his campaign, Frost, a survivor of gun violence, worked as an activist and organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union and March for Our Lives. He ran on ending gun violence, protecting U.S. democracy and fighting the climate crisis, defeating Republican Calvin Wimbish and independents Jason Holic and Usha Jain to claim the seat vacated by Rep. Val Demings (D)
Now SHARK WEEK is racist!
Woke Washington Post claims annual Discovery Channel predator-fest features too many white male experts onscreen
The Post's article cites researchers who accused the Discovery Channel of featuring too many white men as shark experts
Specifically, it claims there were more white experts and men named Mike than women featured in the Discovery special over the years
It also makes the case that the annual Shark Week emphasizes 'negative messages about sharks
The Washington Post published an article this week that cited research accusing The Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week of 'overwhelmingly' featuring white men as shark experts compared to other demographics.
The article claimed that the fan-favorite predator-centric week lacks diversity and over-represents guys named Mike. The study on which the article is based claimed that there have been more shark experts named Mike featured on all Shark Weeks combined than women.
The study was led by Lisa Whitenack, a biology professor, who grew up loving sharks but seeing very few people who looked like her talking about them on TV.
Male researchers inspect a shark during Discovery Channel's beloved annual Shark Week
Mostly male experts inspect a 12-foot Great White shark that washed up on a South African shore in 2019. It had had its liver ripped out by a Killer Whale
Biology professor Lisa Whitenack led a research team that concluded that men and specifically men named Mike are over represented as experts during Shark Wee
She said that because women were underrepresented in shark documentaries, she was unaware that she could become a shark researcher
'Why would I know I could do that?'
'I don't come from a family of scientists. I didn't see very many people that looked like me on television,' she said.
Whitenack used the pandemic as an opportunity to study whether Shark Week was 'feeding audiences the wrong messages about sharks - and who studies them.'
The research team watched Shark Week programming dating back to the late 90s and discovered that it 'emphasized negative messages about sharks, lacked useful messaging about shark conservation, and overwhelmingly featured white men as experts - including several with the same name.'
David Shiffman, a conservationist member of the team, said the program, which dates back 34 years, 'featured more White experts and commentators named 'Mike' than women.'
'When there are hundreds of people of color interested who work in this field, [and] when my field is more than half women, maybe it's not an accident anymore that they're only featuring White men,' he said.
The article's author, Daniel Wu, also cites marine biologist Catherine MacDonald, who previously wrote that women in marine sciences are likely to encounter the field's 'misogynistic' culture.
She wrote in a 2020 Scientific American piece that ''Shark Week’ further concentrates power (in the form of publicity and media attention) in the hands of white male ‘featured scientists,’ exacerbating academic power imbalances.'
White male expert Dickie Chivell gives a Shark Week presentation during his segment 'Air Jaws' on Discovery Channel
Carlee Bohannon is also featured in the article. She is the co-founder of Minorities in Shark Sciences and someone actively working to amend the unbalanced demographic trend lines of who is featured in shark programming.
'Diversity in people brings diversity in thought, which ultimately brings innovation,' she said. 'Being able to see someone who looks like you in this field really has an impact.'
In response - direct or indirect - to Discovery's apparent lack of diversity among shark expert voices, National Geographic inked a partnership with Minorities in Shark Sciences that allowed members of the organization to compete in the network's competing SharkFest.
During the 2022 SharkFest, seven scientists of color from the group appeared on the TV event.
NEITHER FAIR NOR BALANCED
Parents swept up into controversy over After School Satan Club speak out: 'At their wits' end'
Critics maintain After School Satan Clubs are 'wearing down the inhibitions' of impressionable children
"Tucker Carlson Tonight" features The Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves as he describes what an after-school club offers children.
As controversy roils a Virginia town over a planned Satanist after-school club, organizers and parents on both sides of the issue spoke to Fox News Digital to share their perspectives.
The city of Chesapeake has recently drawn national attention as the center of a firestorm sweeping the southeastern Virginia community after The Satanic Temple has attempted to establish an After School Satan Club (ASSC) for kids at the local B.M. Williams Primary School. ‘Fear and indoctrination’
"Regarding parents who are upset about the club, I would like them to know that we are here because we have worked with educators to develop an after-school program that is engaging and fun and helps young minds grow and thrive," June Everett, an ordained minister in The Satanic Temple and campaign director of ASSC, told Fox News Digital.
Maintaining that ASSC "fosters creativity and projects [that] are often designed to benefit the community and promote empathy," Everett said The Satanic Temple attempts to establish such clubs "as a constructive and positive alternative to other religious after-school clubs that often glorify fear and indoctrination."
Everett said she was first led to The Satanic Temple five years ago after her first-grader "was traumatized by his classmates on the playground one day, and they were attendees of the Good News Club that was taking place at the public elementary school he was attending at the time."
Candles are seen for sale at the headquarters of The Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, on Oct. 8, 2019. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
"I picked him up from school one afternoon, crying and upset after he was told that he would burn in hell away from his mommy and daddy and Molly, our dog at the time, if we didn’t accept Jesus Christ into our hearts and start going to church," Everett continued. "I knew there was a Good News Club [there] at the time, and this prompted me to start researching them more, and I realized that this is their goal: to use children who attend the club to proselytize to their peers."
"Satanism truly has made me a better person, a better friend, a better parent and a much better contributing member of society."
Everett, who earlier this week resubmitted an application to establish an ASSC in Chesapeake after the original sponsor withdrew, said the congregation at her local chapter of The Satanic Temple took her in "with such open arms."
"I had never met such genuine, non-judgmental people in my life," she said. "Satanism truly has made me a better person, a better friend, a better parent and a much better contributing member of society."
Everett said she believes that "the evangelicals" in particular emphasize fear and indoctrination in their approach, citing that the Child Evangelism Fellowship's (CEF) stated mission for the Good News Clubs they sponsor is "to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living." ‘We emphasize the goodness of God’
Lydia Kaiser, a spokesperson for the Missouri-based CEF, could not comment on the specifics of Everett's situation because she was not involved, but she described as "typical" the accusation that Good News Clubs browbeat children into Christianity. Their curriculum materials for children, however, emphasize God's goodness and do not contain vivid descriptions of hell, she told Fox News Digital.
"We believe that there is a physical place called hell, we believe all that the Bible says about it," said Kaiser. "But when we're talking to children, the way we describe it is ‘separation from God.’"
"You don't need all the scary description," Kaiser continued. "We don't want to scare children into making a decision. We want them to desire a relationship with God. That's our goal. And so we emphasize the goodness of God, how much God loves them and wants to forgive them for their sin and be their friend, their Savior and their Lord."
Lydia Kaiser of the Child Evangelism Fellowship said their curriculum emphasizes God's goodness and does not contain vivid descriptions of hell. (Manusapon Kasosod via Getty Images)
"We try to draw children into a relationship with God by describing him as good, and the bad we describe as separation from all of that," she added.
Kaiser, who noted that parents are welcome to observe what goes on at after-school Good News Clubs, parried arguments that children are too young to reflect on spiritual issues by pointing out how children are expected by adults to learn other basics of human existence such as a healthy diet and personal hygiene. ‘The real danger’
Stephen Mannix, who said he has served for about 15 years as the chairman of his local CEF chapter in the Virginia Tidewater region, said he plans to speak about the ASSC brouhaha at next week's scheduled school board meeting in Chesapeake.
"They say they don't have any religious content, but it's bigger than that," Mannix told Fox News Digital of the Satan clubs.
ASSC claims not to teach of a personal devil, but rather serves as a place where young students can learn about benevolence and empathy, critical thinking, problem-solving, creative expression, personal sovereignty and compassion.
Both Mannix and Kaiser believe that since The Satanic Temple started its ASSC campaign in 2016, it has been using the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Good News Club v. Milford Central School to stir up hysteria in various places that sponsor Good News Clubs until school boards feel compelled to shut down after-school clubs altogether.
The case ultimately rose to the Supreme Court after an upstate New York school district denied an application to a Good News Club on the basis that "the kinds of activities proposed to be engaged in by the Good News Club were not a discussion of secular subjects such as child-rearing, development of character and development of morals from a religious perspective, but were in fact the equivalent of religious instruction itself."
The Supreme Court's opinion, which was written by former Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled in favor of the Good News Club, noting that restrictions on speech in a "limited public forum" such as a public school must not discriminate on the basis of the speaker's viewpoint.
The school district's attorneys in the case argued that having a religious club on public school property, even after school hours, would violate the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution by leading children to believe that the school or the government was somehow establishing a particular religion.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion of the Supreme Court in Good News Club v. Milford Central School, which critics argue has been used by The Satanic Temple to bludgeon after-school Christian clubs. (Alex Wong via Getty Images)
The Court shot that argument down, writing: "Finally, even if we were to inquire into the minds of schoolchildren in this case, we cannot say the danger that children would misperceive the endorsement of religion is any greater than the danger that they would perceive a hostility toward the religious viewpoint if the Club were excluded from the public forum."
The Satanic Temple "does not believe in introducing religion into public schools and will only open a club if other religious groups are operating on campus," according to their website.
"We are only doing this because Good News Clubs have created a need for this," Lucien Greaves, cofounder of The Satanic Temple, told The Washington Post in 2016. "If Good News Clubs would operate in churches rather than public schools, that need would disappear. But our point is that if you let one religion into the public schools you have to let others, otherwise it’s an establishment of religion."
"The danger becomes this lie of a secularized space that bans and censors and tells Christians to go home," said Mannix. "That's where the real danger is." Close-up on a black book with an inverse pentagram on a brown wooden board. (iStock)
Kaiser and Mannix pointed out the short shelf life of Satanist clubs as an indication of their intention merely to sow discord in an attempt to shut down competing Christian clubs.
Everett confirmed to Fox News Digital that only four clubs are currently active in the U.S., pending the approval of a fifth in Chesapeake.
‘Wearing down the inhibition of children’
"They say that they don't actually teach kids about Satan," Kaiser said of the Satan clubs. "They say it's more about humanism and so-called tolerance, which is ironic when they're actually being intolerant, trying to get us kicked out."
"But they have an 8,000-pound statue of Satan with two little elementary-aged children looking at it adoringly," Kaiser continued. "If every time the story was run, they would show a picture of this mascot, people would be able to judge for themselves whether they're trying to appeal to children with Satanism."
"They're wearing down the inhibition of children so that they'll think it's fine to attend a truly satanic event when they're older," she added. A statue depicting children gazing up at a satanic figure in the conversion room at The Satanic Temple in Salem, Massachusetts, on Oct. 8, 2019. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
The statue Kaiser referenced, which The Satanic Temple unveiled in 2015, cost $100,000 to make and has featured repeatedly in its public campaigns. Standing at nearly 9 feet tall, the bronze figure depicts a boy and a girl gazing up at a winged, goat-headed hermaphrodite known as Baphomet, which has historically been presented as a satanic symbol.
Citing "the heightened emotional situation in our city" following the recent mass shooting at a local Walmart, the original sponsor of the ASSC in Chesapeake withdrew her name this week, according to The Virginian-Pilot. Other organizers promptly resubmitted the necessary paperwork and still aim to roll out the ASSC at the primary school on Dec. 15.
Aspen Nolette, a local parent and founder of Chesapeake Parents for Freedom, said the ASSC has caused an "uproar" in her community and that parents are increasingly wearied by what is going on in public schools.
"People are extremely upset, they're extremely disturbed, I think," Nolette told Fox News Digital. "In the nation right now, you've got boys attempting to go into girls' bathrooms. You saw what happened in Loudoun County, Virginia, and the assault that happened there because of that. You've got pornographic books and graphic novels in our schools that parents are extremely upset about because we have laws about distributing pornography to children."
"And now you've got After School Satan Clubs. From what I've seen, and I've been involved in this for a couple of years, parents are at their wits' end," Nolette added. "The Satan clubs seem to be where they drew the line."
Jon Brown is a writer for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to jon.brown@fox.com.
