The Satanic Temple is taking on the Christian right. It may be effective – it’s definitely fun | Arwa Mahdawi

Satan is a feminist now

The devil works hard, but the Republican party works harder. Not a day seems to go by without anti-abortion zealots on the right advancing some cunning new plan to strip women of their bodily autonomy. As well as shutting down abortion clinics, Republican states are trying to essentially outlaw abortion pills: on Friday, Missouri, Kansas and Idaho renewed a legal push to drastically reduce access to mifepristone.

Amid this hellscape, help may be at hand from a somewhat unlikely source: Satan. Or, to be more accurate – and since the devil is in the details – the Satanic Temple.

Founded in 2012, the Satanic Temple (which is not to be confused with the very different Church of Satan) is not about devil worship. Rather, it is about raising hell to fight for freedom from the religious right’s crusade to impose their beliefs on everyone else. “Right now, we have a minority religious theocratic movement, so entrenched in politics and getting away with whatever they want,” co-founder Lucien Greaves told the Guardian earlier this year.

Recognized as a religion by the IRS, the Satanic Temple uses the religious right’s tactics, and their victories, against them. When a Ten Commandments monument was erected at the Oklahoma state capitol in 2012, for example, the temple submitted an application to put a 7ft-tall statue depicting Satan as Baphomet, a goat-headed figure with horns, alongside it. In its application, it argued that the decision to have a Ten Commandments monument paved the way for satanic representation. (They weren’t the only ones protesting: the satirical Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster also requested a monument.) In the end, the Ten Commandments statue was removed by order of the state’s supreme court and the Horned One did not get immortalized in Oklahoma.

Over the years, the Satanic Temple has taken on issues like prayer in the classroom, after-class Bible study groups, and the distribution of Bibles in schools. Now, for obvious reasons, it’s increasingly turning its not-so-evil eye to abortion rights. Last year, it opened an online abortion clinic in New Mexico called The Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic, in reference to the conservative justice who wrote the majority opinion that overturned Roe v Wade. “In 1950, Samuel Alito’s mother did not have options, and look what happened,” Malcolm Jarry, co-founder of the Satanic Temple said at the time.

As with its other causes, the Satanic Temple brands abortion as a core part of its religious beliefs. Women are asked to recite a ritual (“By my body, my blood, by my will, it is done”) before taking abortion pills to ward off “unjust persecution”. The temple has also sued states that have banned abortion, arguing that abortion is a religious rite for their congregation and that denying them access to these ritual abortions would be a constitutional violation.

All of this has had the desired effect of driving the satanists’ adversaries bonkers. The Christian Research Institute, an evangelical group, described the group as “troll lords” and said they were “exploiting their cartoonishly dark and villainous branding to agitate the public and pester the Christian Right into a judicial showdown”.

That showdown may be forthcoming because the Satanic Temple has just opened its second telehealth abortion clinic, this time in Virginia. It’s called the Right to Your Life Satanic Abortion Clinic. “We’re also actively working to increase access in other states, including taking legal action in restrictive states such as Indiana and Idaho to provide religious abortion services there as well,” the temple said in a statement. Truly, they are doing the Lord’s work.

“It is important to protect people, primarily the younger generation, from having the ideology of childlessness imposed on them on the internet, in the media, in movies and in advertising,” one politician said. I imagine that JD Vance, who has very strong views on “childless cat ladies” is nodding along furiously to all this, and taking notes for copycat legislation in the US.

US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

Video footage shot by the group Hope Not Hate and reviewed by the Guardian show the company Heliospect Genomic marketing its services at up to $50,000 for 100 embryos, with one manager boasting a possible gain of more six IQ points. A genetics expert told the Guardian that one of the many problems with this “is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics … [and] reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.

UK women who suffer cardiac arrest in public less likely to get CPR

According to a new study, this is because bystanders worry about touching women’s breasts when giving chest compressions. The report suggests better training could address this problem and save lives.

More American women than men have tattoos

Thirty-eight percent of women v 27% of men, to be exact, according to Pew Research Center. The Washington Post explores the ways that some women use tattoos to represent a way of “reclaiming control” over their bodies.

A South Korean court recognizes misogyny as a motive for hate crime in landmark ruling

The ruling was made in regards to a case where a woman was attacked by a man who shouted “feminists deserve to be beaten” because she had short hair.

Donald Trump calls himself the ‘father of IVF’ during a Fox News town hall

After this nonsensical statement, he added that he hadn’t actually known what IVF was until Senator Katie Britt, whom Trump described as a “a fantastically attractive person from Alabama”, explained it to him. “And within about two minutes, I understood it,” the former president exclaimed. Donald: I’m not sure you actually did.

Nicola Coughlan says being called a ‘plus-size heroine’ is insulting

Coughlan had strong words for viewers who called her “brave” for the nudity scenes in season 3 of Bridgerton. “Don’t call me brave. I have a cracking pair of boobs … that’s actually just me showing them off,” she told Time magazine. “I’m a few sizes below the average size of a woman in the UK and I’m seen as a ‘plus-size heroine’ … Making it about how I look is reductive and boring.”

Palestinian woman shot by the IDF while picking olives in the West Bank

Hanan Abu Salameh, 59, had been picking olives with her family when she was killed. Her son has said that the Israeli forces started shooting randomly and shot his mother when she was fleeing. The IDF has said it is “investigating” but, based on prior “investigations”, one imagines nobody will be held accountable.

The week in pawtriarchy

A US paraglider flying over Egypt’s great pyramids recently spotted something unusual on top of the second-tallest pyramid. Was it a bird? Was it a plane? No, it was a dog that had seemingly summited the 448ft-tall structure so it could bark at birds. After a satisfying barking session, the dog made its way down safely. However, since climbing the pyramids is illegal, the adventurous animal could well find itself in the doghouse.