After a Ten Commandments monument was ruled unconstitutional and removed this week from Oklahoma statehouse grounds, Republican governor Mary Fallin has called for legislation allowing voters to decide whether it should be returned.
This prompted the Satanic Temple to call in no uncertain terms for Fallin’s removal from office, describing her an “embarrassment.” The organization became a key player in the case when members commissioned a goat-headed Baphomet statue to be placed at the capitol if the Ten Commandments stayed.
"Proselytizing politicians with a self-serving, laughably contorted view of the First Amendment have become an epidemic in the United States that is in desperate need of being addressed," wrote Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves in an email to Raw Story. "We ignore Mary Fallin's expensive and pointless buffoonery at our own peril. She's not only a disgrace to Oklahoma, she's a disgrace to the entire nation."
Greaves called Fallin and politicians like her a threat to the principles the nation was founded on.
"Fallin, and the many like her who now populate our offices of public service with a focused agenda to establish theocratic norms, threaten our very foundations, and it's well past time that they should bear consequences for -- not only a failure to uphold their oaths of office -- but their attempts to actively undermine them," he wrote.
Greaves said Fallin's call to allow the public to "vote as to whether or not they will continue to respect the Constitution, demonstrates how unfit she is for office."
He said she should be removed from office because "Oklahoma deserves better."
She has an egregious and embarrassing misunderstanding of how the political process works, the system of checks and balances, and a grossly misguided sense of even the appropriate activities of a public official... While I'm certain that Fallin's call to reestablish a home for the 10 Commandments on Capitol grounds will result in failure, the entire nation should unite in urging her removal from office.
The group's $100,000 Baphomet statue is currently housed in Detroit. The Temple has joined forces with the Universal Society of Hinduism to challenge Arkansas, which also has a Ten Commandments monument on state capitol grounds.
The Hindu organization had asked to have a statue of the deity Hanuman placed alongside the Christian monument and Arkansas officials refused. The Temple is planning to seek permission to have Baphomet placed there as well in a fight that seems to be gearing up to head in the same direction as it did in Oklahoma.
