I'm gonna rant here a little too because I am all for for this happening.
Long story short, back in January Vital Remains and Satanist vocalist Brian Werner started up an IndieGoGo to help build a statue of Baphomet to put in front of the Oklahoma State Capitol based on the grounds that there's already an homage to the Ten Commandments out there. Representation of one religion outside a state building? Doesn't sound like separation of church and state to me! Thus, the Satanists took themselves to task and even went as far as planning a statue that was "family-friendly," which as you can see above it absolutely is. Or at least that's the mold of the statue… because yes, the Satanists are planning on making a bunch of these and just throwing them around.
So what are the chances of the statue making it? Well, pretty good right now. Currently there's a legal battle being fought over the Ten Commandments being outside the building so there's a halt on putting new statues there, but the Satanists aren't taking that as a reason to stop this train rolling. A representative from the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) told Vice.com (who also got the pictures of the statue) that the Satanists pretty much have every right to do what they're doing and it seems like the whole thing is really going to happen! Super awesome.
“If, at the end of the day, the Ten Commandments monument is allowed to remain on the Capitol grounds with its overtly Christian message, then the Satanic Temple’s proposal can’t be rejected because it is of a different religious viewpoint.”
Here's what makes me angry- Oklahoma State Representative Paul Wesselhoft told a local news station earlier in the year that the Ten Commandments are "historically significant" to the state and Baphomet is not, so that's why there's a status of one not the other.
"'The only reason why the Ten Commandments qualified,' he continued, 'is because at the Capitol, what we do is we make laws. We are lawmakers. Well, one of the earliest laws we have are the Ten Commandments.' This, it is important to remember, was said by a current democratically elected member of the legislature.
Greaves told [Vice] that 'the idea that the Ten Commandments are foundational to US or Oklahoman law is absurd and obscene… I would argue that the message behind our monument speaks more directly to the formation of US Constitutional values than the Ten Commandments possibly could. It especially does so when it stands directly beside the Ten Commandments, as it affirms no one religion enjoys legal preference.'"
No. Fuck that. You believe that those are the first laws because they're a part of your religion. The Code of Hammurabi, for example, is an accurate and real representation of the law. Hell, the Code of Ur-Nammu from the Mesopotamians is the oldest written law we know of, and we can hold that shit in our hands. If you want to believe in a bunch of rocks handed down from the sky, cool man. Do your thing, but you don't get to tell me that that's representative of Oklahoma and their history. Also, and I'm just throwing this out there, the Ten Commandments weren't really "laws" so much as they were a moral code… the Code of Ur-Nammu was an actual set of legal laws.
So who's going to support my petition to Oklahome to get a statue of the Code of Ur-Nammu built outside their state capitol as well?
