Instead, they're asking that the FDA grant them unrestricted access to abortifacients and be allowed to use them without government interference. There's precedent to providing unrestricted access to drugs for religious purposes.
If their tactic works (and yes it's doubtful, considering the lack of a true Lady Justice behind the courts these days), it doesn't interfere with anything on the common law side of abortion. Also, the Temple is not asking for this in just Texas, but anywhere they practice.
Yeah but that's exactly the thing. If the government grants this right it will be only for Satanic temple members and literally no one else. Because that's what the precedent is - as with for instance peyote, which wasn't made available to everyone, just to Native American Church members. That's fine and for the greater good that Native Americans get exclusive access to peyote for their traditional ceremonies because nobody else
needs to use peyote; but it is not for the greater good that a couple dozen women get protected-class access to abortifacents in Texas as a
religious practice, while the vast overwhelming majority of Texan women who deserve access for medical and self-determination reasons get denied.
The Satanic temple has a history of trolling in attempts to get "religious exemptions" under the law in general cancelled. Lugging their statue around and demanding that it be put up on city property for example, isn't because the Satanic temple actually wants the statue to be put up in front of courthouses or in public parks for Christmas; the statue is actually
meant to be so offensive that Christians will willingly give up the right to put up their own religious statues in order to make sure the Satanic one doesn't get to stay. If it works as intended, a local city will cancel religious displays altogether, which is a win. On the other hand, if it doesn't work as intended, and the city actually lets the statue stay, that's not a win in the same sense but at least it's still "funny" because the fuddy-duddies have to see and be offended by the statue whenever they visit the park now and there's nothing they can do about it, so it's not entirely a loss either.
But it's wrongheaded of them to approach this issue in the same way. Because in this case, rather than "either religious exemptions are eliminated OR the fundies have to rage impotently", the two options are "nothing changes at all OR a religious exemption purely for Satanic Temple members is created", both of which give them plenty of publicity per usual but neither of which actually advances or restores the cause of women's reproductive rights (and even harms the cause by injecting "religious rights" into a secular civil rights issue), AND a "win" in this case establishes a new religious exemption which is exactly the kind of thing they up until now claimed to fight against.
