https://thesatanictemple.com/pages/new-fundraiser
The Satanic Temple is opening a second abortion clinic! Donors can vote on the name. My favorites: Beelzabort The Preemptive Stork’s Abortion Clinic, and Ejaculate Misconception Family Unplanning Clinic
TST’s abortion campaign - which is strongly opposed by multiple pro-abortion support groups in multiple States - is a classic example of how they operate.
Not only are they depriving legitimate pro-abortion groups of attention and funding, they are getting people to donate money for their business.
New Mexico, where their current clinic is, has no problem with abortion. I see they’re not naming the state where this new one will be but I’m betting it will be somewhere equally trouble-free for those seeking an abortion.
What this ‘competition’ is doing, like all TST’s fundraisers, is getting you to fund their start up costs in an abortion friendly State without any requirement to give anyone a return on that donation.
If you want to support pro-abortion causes - and you should - support organisations who will actually help people.
I would agree they aren’t the “most suited” organization to save abortion as there are many groups, like Planned Parenthood and others that are more dedicated to abortion access in the hardest places to obtain them. As far as I understand the TST’s primary focus is asserting freedom of association and ensuring government policy does not favour one particular religion. Abortion rights are then a corollary campaign under that.
If a woman’s right to choose is being needlessly restricted due to religious pressures, using a group registered as religious to curb them would occur to me as a reasonable route to pursue simultaneously, even if not all the money would have been donated to groups that specialize in abortion access.
Which would be fine if they were actually effective at anything besides trying to get money from people. They’ve lost every abortion related legal action they’ve started so far.
By contrast, a religious group (the so-called ‘Hoosier Jews for Choice’) that aren’t inept and can actually be effective and aren’t more interested in your bank balance than your politics secured a landmark ruling for abortion rights in April this year.
TST’'s finances are utterly opaque - only their two owners (because it is a business) know what comes in and what goes out and they aren’t telling. There are much better groups to donate both time, effort and money to instead of some very dodgy group with a worrying reputation.
I would argue they are effective in some areas, by offering confidential telehealth services that prescribe medication for those who have a NM mailing address and are in NM at the time of virtual visit, but a patient can be resident of any state regardless of what is banned there. Besides abortion, the group has had successes against religious favoritism in schools and legislative buildings, be it chaplains, after school programs, bringing to the forefront the fact the right is trying to force the church and state together into a fascist theocracy. Also, losing cases on allowing abortions for religious reasons, is not for nothing either, as it can make it difficult for religious groups to use faith as justification for the opposite for example.
Again, I totally agree with you that abortion isn’t this group’s main subject of expertise or most influential division compared to other groups, but to say they aren’t effective and that they do nothing but take people’s money, I don’t think is true and I haven’t seen enough credible evidence to think otherwise either. I argue that while fighting religion with religion isn’t necessarily the most effective in all cases, it is one avenue of many to pursue against the puritan agenda and that’s what I believe the niche that TST fills.
I’m not arguing that fighting religion with religion is a bad idea - I’m saying they’re not very good at it. The last time I checked they’d won 3 rulings out of a possible 32. That’s across all cases, not just abortion. In the meantime, religious groups that are not inept are winning cases. And the more headlines TST generate, the more posts like this one pop up across all forms of social media and the less attention people pay to legitimate groups that actually can - and do make a difference.
I would urge you to look further into the histories of the owners of TST, one of who wanted to launch TST by publishing a sequel to Might Is Right a protofascist screed that Anton LaVey cribbed from for the Church of Satan.
I also don’t think they’re entirely about taking people’s money. But they sure do do a lot of that and no one seems to know exactly where that money goes.