Iowa Republicans are afraid of the First Amendment

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers. A version of this essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, The Odd Man Out.

Here we are again.

We saw this last year with them calling for the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s holiday display “objectionable.” We saw this in the last few years with Governor Kim Reynolds signing the “religious freedom restoration act,” which critics correctly claimed would privilege Christianity and religion over other faiths and irreligion.

We saw this with the Republican administration taking public dollars from public schools and sending them to unscrupulous and unaccountable religious institutions. We saw this with the state legislature mandating an oath to a deity in classrooms statewide with the pledge of allegiance in public schools.  We saw this in the last ten years with the Muslim ban from President Donald Trump. We saw this in the last decades when the atheists wanted to run some bus ads or put up billboards.

Time and again we see the Republican Party, particularly the Republican Party of Iowa, finding new and ever more egregious ways to privilege their favored flavor of religion—Christianity—at the public’s expense.

This latest story with the Iowa state capitol denying the Satanic Temple of Iowa’s family event on December 14 is another bullet point hammering home the Republican Party’s complete abandonment of equal protection under the law. The Satanic Temple of Iowa had already dodged their way through the quagmire of new rules that mandates only one public event in the capitol per year, and filed their request well ahead of the event. They even worked with the capitol personnel over several weeks to ensure compliance and accessibility. 

Rather than giving equal access to the Satanic Temple, the Iowa Department of Administrative Services chose instead to cancel the event at the eleventh hour with little notice and no justification. Only after public objection was a short unsubstantiated response given citing “harm to minors” despite giving no justification or advance notice, with no further comment since.

If you look at the calendar for the Capitol Complex, it is chock full of church events, Bible readings, and general theocratic lobbying, many of them explicitly Christian and explicitly proselytizing in the seat of the states power. It seems strange that a laser focus is applied to one religious organization but not to the others.

Even if the administration allows an event to go on at a later date, the message is entirely clear: If you are determined to have a faith—or no faith—that is deemed undesirable by the explicitly Christian administration, then you have fewer rights and protections than others. The Republican Party and the Republican-led government of Iowa has essentially solidified their position on these issues: they are the party of Christian Nationalism and corporate greed, not the party of freedom of speech, religion, redress, or even public gathering. 

For them the First Amendment isn’t a bedrock of American democracy, but something to be used as a cudgel. They’d rather wrap up a newspaper to smack a secular gadfly than read the paper and what it stands for, all the while making utterances about the importance of freedom of press and expression.

As a voting and purportedly publicly interested people, when is this going to be enough? When are we going to take the words of our state motto seriously and actually Prize our Liberties and do what we can to Maintain our Rights? Instead, Republicans have made it a priority to enshrine Christian supremacy at every turn and doing their best to create a multi-tiered system of accessibility and justice for our citizens. Even if it is not a law or an executive order, the Republicans continue to wield all levels of power in favor of their faith and against all others.

Ultimately the Satanic Temple celebration is one event on one day for one group, but that is how this starts. If the People’s House can be arbitrarily closed to one group on one day with no justification or evidence, then who’s to say the next group won’t be denied? If only one flavor of faith is permitted to use a space unmitigated, then is it really equal access and a justifiable position for the capitol?

As a champion of secular government this should not stand, and it shouldn’t stand for anyone that agrees with the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and Article I, Section 3 of Iowa’s constitution:

The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; nor shall any person be compelled to attend any place of worship, pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing places of worship, or the maintenance of any minister or ministry.

That means the government must treat all religions equally, even The Satanic Temple of Iowa, or allow no religion in the state capitol. Iowans need to use their vote and their speech to hold Republicans accountable to the constitution.

About the Author(s)

Jason Benell

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