Costello: OKC Should Stand Against Satanic Mass
Are Oklahoma City Bureaucrats Smarter Than Harvard?
By Mark Costello
In 1928, the first Roman Catholic ever nominated for president, Gov. Al Smith of New York, came to campaign in Oklahoma at the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s power. Smith was greeted with numerous burning crosses during the night as his train rolled across the state. When Smith spoke to a rally in Oklahoma City, the KKK burned more crosses outside of the stadium where his campaign rally was held, inciting hatred and fomenting violence. Some of Smith’s relatives were listening to radio broadcasts of the proceedings and said they believed the atmosphere was so volatile that “they expected a bullet, expected to hear a gun go off.”
Smith then delivered what many consider to be the most courageous speech ever given by a presidential nominee. In it he said, “There is no greater mockery in the world today than the burning of the cross by these people who are spreading this propaganda …. (the symbol of) the Christ they are supposed to adore… . To inject bigotry, hatred, intolerance and un-American sectarian division into a campaign… . Nothing could be so contradictory of our whole history.”
As a child in 1966, I remember leaflets were dropped by an airplane over Bartlesville that read, “Don’t vote for Dewey Bartlett. He is a Roman Catholic.” The fair-minded voters of Oklahoma overcame the religious prejudices and elected the best person for the job — Bartlett, our first Catholic governor.
Despite past hobgoblins in our state history who have insulted Catholics and the Catholic Church, nothing compares in degree or kind to what the government of Oklahoma City has sanctioned at the Civic Center on September 21. A Satanic “Black mass” is scheduled on government property. One particular faith is being blasphemed, ridiculed, and mocked in what can only be called in contemporary terms, “hate speech.” The specious legal reasoning that Oklahoma City bureaucrats used to permit this sacrilege fails standards of reason and civility. Harvard University in May canceled the same event on their campus without fear of legal reprisal or First Amendment abridgement.
It was wrong in 1928 for government officials to stand idly by as the Klan burned crosses on government property to incite violence and hatred against a presidential candidate because of his faith. In 2014, it is wrong for government officials, in the guise of political correctness, to allow Satanists on taxpayer property to blaspheme and incite hatred against the Catholic Church. Those bureaucrats who have sanctioned this outrage and the city elected officials who have circled around them should be released to industry to seek other opportunities.
Mark Costello is Oklahoma Labor Commissioner.
Harvard is a private university and thus not under the same constraints against restricting freedom of speech as a government entity. Further, Harvard and most other universities are not in the habit of renting out their facilities to the general public. If a government entity that offers a venue to any group in the general public to discriminate against a group because their views are unpopular it is repression of freedom of expression and to do so because the unpopular views are religious in nature violates the right to free exercise of religion.
Costello’s comparison of these purported satanists and the KKK is also of questionable relevance. The KKK was powerful enough at one point just a few years prior to Alfred Smith’s visit to Oklahoma City to be able to get a Governor(Jack Walton) removed from office. No one in their right mind thinks that these yahoos putting on the Black Mass have any influence at all in the earthly realm.
What is true is that virtually no one, not even the people who are willing to defend their right to have their silly ritual, thinks that these ‘satanists’ represent anything positive. The Labor Commissioner is merely practicing his own ritual of unwholesome provenance, that of the politician pandering to the people.
As is usual, Costello is full of it. The Oklahoma City government is sanctioning nothing. It is merely abiding by the first amendment of the United States constitution. Whether I like it, whether Mark ‘Full of It’ Costello likes it, the group that will conduct the ‘Black Mass’ is a religion. If it can be prevented from using government-owned facilities, then any and all religious groups have to be prevented from using Oklahoma City government-owned facilities.
Costello is fuller of it than I had thought. I wondered why Harvard officials had been able to cancel permission for Lucien Greaves’ group to use Harvard facilities. It’s because Harvard is a PRIVATE university. Harvard is not government-owned. Thus, it is not subject to the same U.S. constitution first amendment requirements that the Oklahoma City government is bound by.
I suggest that Oklahoma’s Labor Commissioner return to the Oklahoma middle school of his choice to enroll in and pass a remedial government/civics course. His need to do so is glaring.
Harvard is a private institution, not a public one, and is therefore not bound by the First Amendment, which only impacts governments, including the City of Oklahoma City and its Civic Center. The entire point of this piece is based on a mistake.
Harvard University a private institution, receives Federal Funds, taxpayer funds… and lots of money in jeopardy from alumni at risk of being pulled, had they not cancelled. The continual ad nauseam response from Oklahoma City leaders, redundantly repeated by Civic Center in response to requests from patrons to cancel, will see as Harvard realized, when underwriters pull funds from productions, and patrons no longer attend events money talks. The First Amendment, much the same as the Holy Bible is misinterpreted to assuage many to use as defense for evil.