One would have thought the principle settled. The United States Supreme Court has, across multiple decades and multiple ideological compositions, affirmed that when a government opens a public forum to religious expression, it may not then sort applicants by theological palatability. This is not a controversial proposition. It is, to use the legal terminology, black-letter law. And yet here is the Iowa Department of Administrative Services, in the year 2026, apparently requiring a federal court to remind it of something taught in the first week of any constitutional law seminar.
The ACLU of Iowa filed suit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Iowa on behalf of the Satanic Temple and its Iowa minister, Mortimer Adramelech. The complaint names the Department of Administrative Services, its current director Mark Campbell, and its former director Adam Steen. It alleges violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the Iowa Civil Rights Act, and Iowa’s own Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The facts, as pleaded, are not ambiguous. In December 2023, the temple was permitted to erect a holiday display in the Capitol rotunda alongside a Christian nativity scene. That display was vandalized. A Mississippi man, Michael Cassidy, was charged with felony hate crime criminal mischief and later pleaded guilty to an aggravated misdemeanor. State officials, rather than condemning the destruction, publicly celebrated it.
Then the rules changed. The department adopted new policies restricting multiday events and limiting organizations to one event per year, policies the lawsuit alleges were tailored and applied to exclude the temple. Applications for 2024, 2025, and 2026 were denied or stalled. The 2024 application proposed caroling, coloring pages, make-and-take ornaments, and a Krampus costume contest. State officials cited the danger of costume participants carrying sticks. The temple offered to eliminate the contest entirely. That offer went unanswered. The 2025 denial came with no explanation at all. The 2026 application had been pending for 159 days when the complaint was filed.
What we are observing is not an aberration. It is a pattern with a long American pedigree. The Free Exercise Clause has always functioned less as a guarantee than as a negotiation, and the party with the stronger electoral incentive has always held the leverage. Iowa’s 2024 civil rights complaint produced a finding of probable cause that religious discrimination occurred. The state’s own administrative apparatus recognized the problem. The political apparatus did not care.
Marija Piliskic / PexelsConsider Adam Steen, who left the directorship to seek the Republican nomination for governor, and who campaigned on his decision to block the temple. At an April event in Marion, he described Krampus as a figure “whose sole purpose in life is to beat children with sticks and take them to hell,” and declared, “That’s not happening on my watch.” The Satanic Temple, which is a nontheistic organization advocating secularism, does not believe in hell. Its general counsel, Matt Kezhaya, stated plainly that no part of the proposed event would involve striking children. Steen either knew this and did not care, or did not know it and did not bother finding out. Both possibilities are equally instructive about how viewpoint discrimination actually operates in practice. It does not require malice so much as indifference to the category of harm one is not personally positioned to experience.
The temple’s attorneys, including the Hasso & Wilson Law Firm and Kezhaya Law PLC, are asking the court for a declaratory judgment, an injunction allowing the December event to proceed, and compensatory damages. They are not seeking punitive damages. One suspects this restraint will not be reciprocated in the court of public opinion, where the phrase “Satanic Temple” functions as a cognitive off switch for a significant portion of the electorate.
Meanwhile, in a separate Polk County action, the ACLU is representing Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers in a public-records dispute over documents related to the 2024 denial. Governor Kim Reynolds’s office withheld certain records under a claim of executive privilege. The governor’s office and the Department of Administrative Services did not respond to requests for comment on the federal suit.
The structural lesson is straightforward, though one grows weary of repeating it. A government that reserves public space for Christianity and calls the result “religious freedom” is not protecting religion. It is protecting a franchise. The First Amendment was not designed to shield majority faiths, which require no shielding. It was designed for exactly this circumstance, for the group whose presence is inconvenient and whose beliefs are unpopular and whose minister is named Mortimer Adramelech. Iowa’s officials have performed a valuable service, albeit unintentionally. They have demonstrated that the distance between constitutional principle and bureaucratic practice is precisely the length of a Krampus costume stick.