“The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It’s fun to watch/Satan is a feminist now/ The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills… Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple. Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple (which is not to be confused with the very different Church of Satan) is not about devil worship. Rather, it is about raising hell to fight for freedom from the religious right’s crusade to impose their beliefs on everyone else…. Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the Satanic Temple uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them. When a Ten Commandments monument was erected at the Oklahoma state capitol in 2012, for example, the temple submitted an application to put a 7ft-tall statue depicting Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, alongside it…. In the end, the Ten Commandments statue was removed by order of the state’s supreme court and the Horned One did not get immortalized in Oklahoma. Over the years, the Satanic Temple has taken on issues like prayer in the classroom, after-class Bible study groups, and the distribution of Bibles in schools. Now, for obvious reasons, it’s increasingly turning its not-so-evil eye to abortion rights. Last year, it opened an online abortion clinic in New Mexico called The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic, in reference to the conservative justice who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade. ‘In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened,’ Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of the Satanic Temple said at the time. As with its other causes, the Satanic Temple brands abortion as a core part of its religious beliefs. Women are asked to recite a ritual (‘By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done’) before taking abortion pills to ward off ‘unjust persecution’. The temple has also sued states that have banned abortion, arguing that abortion is a religious rite for their congregation and that denying them access to these ritual abortions would be a constitutional violation. All of this has had the desired effect of driving the satanists’ adversaries bonkers.”

Arwa Mahdawi in “The Week in Patriarchy” in The Guardian Oct. 19, 2024 [including hed, deck and start] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/19/satanic-temple-fight-against-religious-right].

“it could knock a buzzard off a manure wagon from 100 paces.”

Craig MacInnis in Ottawa Citizen July 23, 2000

“The artist behind a new, much debated portrait of Catherine, Princess of Wales, probably knew she was wading into touchy territory when she took up a commission to paint one of the most closely watched people on the planet. In an interview with Tatler magazine, which commissioned the portrait for its July cover, artist Hannah Uzor… Her portraits aim to capture ‘the soul of the person,’ Uzor said. But for many, the portrait resulting from that close study depicted neither the princess’s soul, nor even her physical characteristics. In response to the painting — showing a calm-looking figure in a fluid white gown against a buoyant blue backdrop — several commenters asked, ‘Who is this?’ ‘The painting is beautiful but does not look like the princess,’ one noted. Others were more direct in their criticism, calling the piece ‘an insult’ and ‘terrible.’… Uzor’s portrait comes just days after a portrait of King Charles III drew its own round of criticism. It also recalls public fury at Amy Sherald’s Michelle Obama portrait in 2018, which viewers similarly argued did not look like her. But with so much public critique centered on resemblance, it’s worth asking if likeness is the right metric for evaluating portraiture. When we have seemingly endless photographic representations of people such as the princess, some say portraits can — and even should — have wider aspirations. ‘Portraiture can be representational or abstract. There are no boundaries or limits,’ Bree Pickering, the director of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, said in an email. ‘Likeness is often something that audiences look for, but as we’ve seen recently, it can be the conversation that happens around the artwork that tells us the most about the times we live in.’ Pickering also notes that ‘portraiture shares a story from an artist’s point of view,’ meaning that it tells viewers about the subject — but can also reveal the ‘broader social context in which it was created.’ Lisa Mansfield, an art historian who studies portraiture at the University of Adelaide, draws a parallel between Uzor’s portrait and Paul Emsley’s official portrait of the then-Duchess of Cambridge, ‘which was unveiled in 2013 to a disparaging chorus of disapproval.’ Such clashes between ‘artistic intention and audience perception reveal the disconnect between what a portrait is and what the world at large thinks a portrait of a princess should look like,’ Mansfield wrote in an email, adding that in an age of social media and selfies, it’s ‘easy to overlook that a portrait is fundamentally a work of artful fiction’ and ‘not a facsimile of the face or body.’ Contemporary artists have long taken creative liberties in depicting leaders….Cherine Fahd, an artist and professor of visual communication at the University of Technology Sydney, wrote in an email that when looking at the Princess Kate portrait, questions like ‘Does the portrait provoke dialogue?’ and ‘Does it reflect or challenge societal contexts?’ are ‘better than “Does it look her?”‘”

Washington Post May 23, 2024

“That the rich had a duty to give to the poor was, of course, a principle as old as Christianity itself. What no one had thought to argue before, though, was a matching principle: that the poor had an entitlement to the necessities of life. It was – in a formulation increasingly deployed by canon lawyers – a human ‘right’. Law, in the Latin West, had become an essential tool of its ongoing revolution.”

Tom Holland Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World [re Gratian and the Decretum and the resulting intellectual and procedural revolution]

“If our government were really a representative government, it would certainly not be a meddlesome government.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News Nov. 15, 1924 quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #3 (Jan.-Feb. 2024)

“Figuratively, at least, people do die of oversedation; fumbling about fearfully, blindly, they grasp the sweet-smelling potions handed them with never a look at the label, and suddenly they are dead. They died ‘natural’ deaths, then.”

Jim Thompson in Edward Gorman, ed., The Black Lizard Anthology of Crime Fiction

In my latest Loonie Politics column I say Mark Carney’s jet-setting quest for European Union “associate membership”, which doesn’t even exist anyway, is classic Carney blarney, all maze and no cheese.

“If thou faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.”

Proverbs XXIV:10 [KJV].