Satan Is Pro-Choice, So Is Jex Blackmore

This article appeared in the May issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.

When I first met Jex Blackmore, director of the Detroit chapter of the Satanic Temple, she had just arrived in New York to plan a series of ritualistic performances alongside the release of the movie The Witch. Over drinks, she relayed to me the vertiginous feeling of looking out the plane window and realizing, I'm being flown to New York because I'm a satanic activist.

It sounds weird, but this is Blackmore's life now. In person, she's affable and matter-of-fact, though traces of Satan are noticeable in her tattoos and leather jacket.

Blackmore first learned about the Satanic Temple, a non-theistic religion centered on the literary figure of Satan, in 2013; she began working with it soon afterward. The Satanic Temple is perhaps best known for its high-profile, often ingenious protests against obvious erosions in the separation of church and state—most famously, the group protested a proposed six-foot-tall statue of the Ten Commandments, which was to be erected outside the state capitol building in Oklahoma, by constructing a sculpture of the goat-headed deity Baphomet.

Recently, the group turned its attention toward the rapid proliferation of laws that restrict women's abortion access, legislation that the group sees as religiously motivated. The cause fits naturally with one of the temple's central tenets, "One's body is inviolable, subject to one's will alone"—which is sort of just a fancy way of saying, "My body, my choice." As a spokesperson for the temple, Blackmore engages in what she calls "political theater," much of which focuses on abortion access. In one memorable action, she and other Satanists protested a pro-life group picketing outside Planned Parenthood by dousing a bound, gasping woman with gallons of milk (to represent "forced motherhood").

According to Blackmore, the group's political theater exposes the bizarreness of the anti-abortion movement. "When you walk by a Planned Parenthood, and there are children holding up signs of mangled fetuses, praying, and accosting women who try to go into this health clinic, we don't even bat a lash anymore," she said. "That's a huge problem."

Blackmore hopes to meet anti-abortion protesters at their level in order to foreground how extreme the rhetoric around the issue has become and to provide a vociferous counterpoint to the debate: "We cannot allow one single angry voice to speak over or for all of us."

This article appeared in the May issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe.