On Tuesday night, Ottumwa resident, satanist, and former city council member Matt Dalbey took the podium to read an invocation to start a routine meeting of the council. “Thank you mayor, council. Let us pray,” Dalbey started. “Dear dark father, let us stand now unbowed and unfettered by arcane doctrines born of fearful minds and darkened times. Let us embrace the Luciferan impulse to eat off the tree of knowledge and dissipate our blissful and comforting delusions of old.”
The prayer is a common one used by the Satanic Temple of Iowa. “Let us demand that individuals be judged for their concrete actions, not for their fealty to arbitrary social norms and illusory categorizations,” he continued. “Let us reason our solutions with agnosticism in all things, holding fast only to that which is demonstrably true. Let us stand firm against any and all arbitrary authority that threatens the personal sovereignty of one or all. That which will not bend must break. And that which can be destroyed by truth should never be spared its demise.”“It is done. Hail Satan,” he finished.
Another citizen, a pastor named Rick Bick, rushed to the podium. “Let’s just reverse that curse that was just put on our city,” he said. “That ending with hail Satan and hail dark god. That’s not welcome here.”
“Mayor, that should be done at the end,” city councilor Cara Galloway said.
“It needs to be done now, OK.” Rick said. “I appreciate what Ms. Galloway is saying but that was a curse put on our city when he said ‘Hail Satan’ and the dark god and most of you know that. And we need to just stop and reverse it.”
“So what I’m gonna do now…I’m just gonna invite us into a 30 second time of prayer — time of silence.”
“No,” Galloway said. “We are at the consent agenda. I’m sorry, but it’s time to move forward. The invocation happened.”
“As mayor of this city…I’m going to ask right now that we do a moment of silence to reflect on whatever it is we need to reflect on at this time. And then we will move to the consent agenda,” mayor Benjamin Foote said.
Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”