Satanist bedevils Roanoke City Council with request to lead a prayer

A guy named Grayson Cotes wants to open a Roanoke City Council meeting with a Satanist invocation, the council said no, and now it's a federal lawsuit. Of course it is. This is the playbook at this point: find a local government body that does prayer before its meetings, show up asking to invoke the Prince of Darkness, get denied, sue. It's not really about faith. It's about forcing an awkward choice on a city council and then writing the press release before the hearing even happens.

Here's the thing though: the legal question isn't crazy, and that's what makes this annoying rather than dismissible. Courts have said for years that if a government opens up a meeting to prayer from citizens, it generally can't pick and choose favorites based on content. Once you invite the public in, you're supposed to treat requests evenhandedly. Roanoke may well have opened itself up to exactly this kind of suit the moment it started letting outside citizens lead invocations instead of sticking with a council chaplain or a moment of silence.

None of that means anyone has to pretend this is a sincere spiritual moment for the city. It's activism wearing a robe. But the fix isn't for council members to get outraged and dig in on refusing this one guy while inviting everyone else. That's the setup that loses in court and hands him exactly the martyrdom he's fishing for. If a city wants prayer at its meetings, it can structure it in ways that survive scrutiny, and if it doesn't want to deal with stunts like this one, it can drop public-led invocations altogether. What it can't do is have it both ways and expect nobody to notice.