Personally, if I was in need of a first amendment lawyer I would go with a firebrand who defends the principles of the first amendment no matter how odious the manifestation than one who picks and chooses who deserves it.

No so much "Do As Thou Wilt", as apparently, 'Have Thee A Vote And Go With The Majority'...and it is not clear that if there had been the vote that they complain there was not, that the chapter would have gone with a negative decision.

I dunno if these guys are Crowley-ans, but the idea of one Satanist or group trying to tell anyone else what to do is not good Satanism, especially when it is apparently based on the moral sensibilities of the of the dissident group. It's pretty funny actually. A church is a church is a church.

It's not their breaking away that is ironic, it's their high sounding moral tone, and seeming desire to justify the doing of Their Will. Doing Thy Will is its own justification.

They're not Crowley-ans. They have nothing to do with the "do as thou wilt" crowd. They're atheists and secularists who are co-opting satanic imagery to trigger fundamentalists that use religious freedom arguments to get around separation of church and state into admitting they only want rights for Christians, thereby ruining the legal basis of their schemes. They're the ones who tried to get that goat-headed devil statue installed next to a 10 commandments monument on public property, resulting in the commandments monument being removed, which was the satanic temple's real goal. Basically they have weaponized trolling for lawsuits.

It's not surprising people who were on board with those goals balking at associating with alt-righters.

Oh, so they are like fake christians who like the lable but not the practice. Got it.

No, you don't got it. They are an activist group for church/state issues that uses the same tactics as those trying to get around the establishment clause - making appeals to religious freedom rhetoric and taking advantage of open access laws - only doing it in such a way as to be religiously odious to the christian right (as opposed to actually odious in a way that would legally legitimize government discrimination, as Crowley/LaVey satanists might be considered), so that when the christian right objects to sharing public spaces with "satanists" they undermine their own legal claims.

The problem secularists face is arguments over religious rights often favor those who profess a religion over those who don't, largely because the framing being used has been created by religious proponents. With the sort of establishment clause cases that the ST has gotten involved with, you have people trying to use public spaces to promote their religion exclusively. If someone simply objects, even on the correct grounds that it amounts to government promotion of one religion over others, they can be dismissed as just "being offended", especially if they are nonreligious.

By creating an ostensible religion, one with intentionally reasonable and harmless beliefs (read their seven fundamental tenets and try to muster any real outrage at them), the ST can interact with these groups on their own terms, and expose the disingenuousness of their agenda when they object to being offended by superficial satan imagery.

Do you think there's some kind of orthodox Satanism that these guys have strayed too far from?

If not orthodox, they could be conservative or reform Satanists. I just hope they're not Hasidic Satanists. Those guys are weird.

It's the little hats.

Crowley wasn't a Satanist.

A shame. I have been following TST for a long while and find LG's decision a bit of a dick move. I can understand the appeal of pro Bono, but I can understand a y TST members feeling queasy about this.