TEXAS: Satanic Temple Launches Billboard Campaign Against School District Over Corporal Punishment

Via press release:

Commuters passing through Springtown, Texas on Route 199 will likely notice a new black billboard emblazoned with a red inverted pentagram framing a goat’s head underneath, which reads: “Paid for by The Satanic Temple.” More prominently, the primary message states: “Never be hit in school again. Exercise your religious rights.”

According to The Satanic Temple spokesperson, Lucien Greaves, “The rationale against child abuse should be obvious to even the dimwitted. Beating children is wrong. Subjecting children to psychological torture is wrong. Neither should be tolerated, much less sanctioned. While there may be general agreement on these points, 19 states in the U.S. still allow corporal punishment in schools, granting teachers immunity from prosecution for beatings occasionally brutal enough to leave injuries that would find any parent charged with a felony.” According to the Department of Education, over 110,000 children are hit in schools each year. This is all the more remarkable because many people are unaware that this practice persists.

”We hold among our tenets that ‘The body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone’. As such, we have launched a campaign to offer an exemption against corporal punishment and solitary confinement to any student who shares this deeply held belief. We have set up a website (www.protectchildrenproject.com) where students can register, whereupon The Satanic Temple will put the child’s school board on notice that subjecting that student to abuse is a violation of their civil rights. We are claiming a religious exemption, under First Amendment protection.”

Placement of the billboard in Springtown is meant to draw attention to the Springtown Independent School District, where corporal punishment is practiced against students. The school district received some negative attention — though not nearly enough, in the Temple’s opinion — when the district took no punitive action against a male vice principal who beat two female students, despite having a policy of same-sex corporal punishment administration. Rather than arrest or, at the very least, fire the vice principal, Superintendent Mike Kelley successfully lobbied the school board to change the rules retroactively to repeal the same-sex restriction.

“Hopefully, our billboard will serve as a daily reminder to the citizens there that they live in a barbaric backwater town where dysfunctional and possibly sexually disturbed middle-aged men may depravedly titillate themselves by violently spanking teenaged girls,” Greaves explains. The billboard should be disturbing to Springtown, as it is there because Springtown has proven to be a disgrace.”

The Temple’s supporting website is here.