The Satanic Temple was on firm legal footing, thanks to the Supreme Court. Back in 2001, the justices heard the case Good News Club v. Milford Central School, about a conservative Christian group that wanted to run an after-school club at the district’s only K-12 school building in central New York. The district had turned down the group’s application, citing state law and district policy against the use of public facilities by religious groups, but the Supreme Court, in a 6–3 decision, ruled in the group’s favor.
Writing for the majority, Thomas concluded that the Constitution’s separation of church and state did not just justify Milford’s violation of the club’s “free speech rights.” “When Milford denied the Good News Club access to the school’s limited public forum on the ground that the Club was religious in nature, it discriminated against the Club because of its religious viewpoint,” he wrote. Thomas’s opinion did not, however, officially endorse the club’s religion, nor suggest that public schools could endorse religion.
The implications of the ruling, being somewhat narrowly written, seemed modest at the time. The Good News Club received no funding from the school district, and there were no school personnel involved. Perhaps most important, from a constitutional perspective, they also wouldn’t be conducting religious worship, only offering children, in the words of the club’s founder, “a fun time of singing songs, hearing a Bible lesson and memorizing scripture.”