OTTUMWA, IOWA (The Daily Whatever Press)—Apparently, religious freedom in Ottumwa, Iowa, was supposed to come with parental controls and a handbook.
On Tuesday, October 6, former city council member Matt Dalbey delivered a Satanic invocation at a council meeting. Pastor Rick Bick (really his name) of New Life Center objected and demanded that the city reverse the curse he believed had just been placed upon it. Mayor Benjamin Foote called for thirty seconds of silence. Municipal government had briefly become The Exorcist, with Roberts Rules of Order apparently in full force, and some very clear confusion about so-called “religious freedom”.
I have severalmany questions. Mostly about why anyone needs supernatural assistance to begin the business of local government, but also about the astonishing discovery that an invitation to people of different beliefs might attract (gasp!) someone with a different belief.
This was not a clerical error. Nobody accidentally booked Beelzebub instead of the Baptist minister, tho’ in fairness I would really love to improve that whole scene: “Thanks for calling Hell, how may I direct your call? Reservations? Please hold.” It’s funnier in my head.
The council adopted its invocation policy on January 20. The policy explicitly embraces religious diversity, other belief systems, and the absence of belief. It also says the city must not express a preference for a particular faith. Those are the instructions. Printed. In the document they adopted. By a vote. Which won.
The surprise here is roughly equivalent to opening a salad bar and discovering someone has selected a vegetable you personally dislike, like cauliflower. Blech!
And because accuracy matters even when the story sounds like a discarded South Park script, there are rules. The policy limits invocations to two minutes, forbids proselytizing and disparaging other beliefs, and makes participation voluntary. This is not permission for absolutely anything. It is, however, explicitly an invitation beyond one religious tradition.
You cannot advertise a theological potluck and then clutch your pearls because somebody brought the deviled eggs.
Dalbey ended with “Hail Satan.” Bick insisted that the supposed curse needed an immediate response rather than waiting for public comments. Which gives us the spectacle of a pastor treating somebody else’s invocation as a spiritual emergency inside a meeting designed to accommodate different beliefs.
As your friendly local secular, quasi-shamanistic Jew, I would prefer that the government handle government. I can manage my own relationship with the universe without a mayor serving as the spiritual bouncer. Hey, give me a drum, a bowl of sage, and some Manischewitz, and I can de-demon that place of yours in a flash.
A council chamber belongs to the residents whose taxes support it. Some are Christians. Some are Jews, Muslims, or people with other religious commitments. Some have no religion. Nobody’s citizenship becomes provisional because the opening prayer makes the person beside them uncomfortable.
If your version of religious freedom requires everyone else’s religion to remain inaudible, you have developed a seating chart for privilege.
And wouldn’t you know it, someone had already identified the problem. Councilwoman Cara Galloway was the lone vote against the policy, back in January. After Tuesday’s controversy, she said she had specifically raised the possibility of a Satanic invocation during the earlier discussion and reminded the council that it needed to remain neutral.
There it is. The warning label was read aloud before purchase.
Galloway deserves credit for resisting the temptation to turn the meeting into an extended performance of I Fucking Told You So, the signature number from my upcoming Broadway musical, I FUCKING TOLD YOU SO. Her point was practical: opening this space means hearing viewpoints you may not share. She also warned that responses to invocations could create problems for the city and its taxpayers.
The Satanic Temple of Iowa, meanwhile, describes itself as non-theistic. Dalbey told the Courier his invocation did not involve belief in a Satanic deity. So the alleged supernatural threat came from somebody who was not claiming the supernatural being existed.
The Satanic Panic rerun has arrived again, again, again, and apparently nobody kept the VHS tape.
But the best receipt is sitting on the city’s own website. Matthew Dalbey’s approval is timestamped January 27. His October 6 invocation was booked January 29. Rick Bick also appears on the invocation schedule, including February and August dates.
Dalbey used the same published opportunity that accommodated Bick. The city had more than eight months’ notice of his October booking. The calendar was right there. Apparently, the fine print was the entire fucking calendar.
I cannot tell you what every council member expected or what motivated each vote. The paperwork cannot read minds. It can establish that this result was foreseeable, expressly warned about, and accommodated by the policy they chose.
They could have opened with the agenda. Roll call. Minutes. Whatever actual work the people of Ottumwa needed done. Instead, they added an invocation process that requires religious neutrality, and then Tuesday’s room struggled with the neutrality part.
Nobody needed to summon a demon to expose the problem. They only needed to read the policy.
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Awesome, Lawrence! You have a great sense of humor about this unusual occurrence in a small Iowa town.
We Jewish people find Christian people very entertaining. Especially when they are not planning to kill anybody.