The Satanic Panic Never Ended (cont’d.)

• “After 30 years, a father is exonerated in ‘satanic panic’ case.”

Melvin Quinney, now 74, was convicted in 1991 for a crime that never occurred. He served eight years in prison and, until his exoneration this week, was required to register as a sex offender for decades. “It was all based on a lie — stemming from a ‘moral satanic panic’ that swept the country, said Innocence Project of Texas director Mike Ware.”

At a press conference following Quinney’s exoneration, Ware struggled to describe the mass hysteria that led to bogus, life-destroying convictions like this one:

In looking back on it, it looks like people lost their minds. And outrageous accusations, horrible accusations, accusations that, in hindsight, have all been proven false were made all over this country and innocent people were convicted all over this country because of this hysteria. Mr. Quinney was one of those.

I agree that this apparent hysteria “looks like” people losing their minds — surely people must have been delusional to believe such outrageous nonsense.

But the thing is they never really believed it. It was a game that made them feel better about themselves. Given the choice between the emotional kick provided by that game and not destroying the lives of people like Melvin Quinney, they chose to keep playing the game.

Quinney is grateful to be exonerated but insists that the “real victims” of his conviction were his four children. He has a point. As very young children they were manipulated by quack therapists and church groups into believing that their father was part of a global conspiracy of Satanic ritual abuse. The same people brainwashing them into believing that used their testimony to send their father to prison, after which they went into foster care, convinced for years that they were being hunted by Satanic members of an evil, powerful conspiracy.

The problem with all of the reporting on Quinney’s exoneration is that it treats the mass hysteria of the Satanic Panic as a closed chapter of the past — as something that swept through the country at the end of the previous century and then, at some point in the 1990s, ended.

But it never ended. The same mass hysteria and reheated-blood-libel conspiracy theory — precisely the same — is still destroying lives and distorting justice all over this country. It’s PizzaGate and QAnon and the “groomer” panic about drag queens and transphobia.

And the same belief — that millions of our otherwise normal-seeming neighbors are secret Satanic baby killers who cannot be trusted — is the basis of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision.

The Satanic Panic never ended. And it now holds a 6-3 majority of the Harlan Crow Court.

• I am a Baptist and OnlySky writer Bruce Ledewitz is an atheist, which is why we both admire the Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray.

“We can all be Gamaliel,” Ledewitz writes. Amen.

• Here is a story about a prominent leader in the “ex-gay ministry” movement. Can you guess what the story will be? Are you guessing that the story will end the same way that every one of these stories ends? Because this is that same story. Again. “Ex-Gay Jeffrey McCall Comes Out as Scarlet McCall.”

• I used to have a really good Jafar costume. Back in the ’90s, I worked part-time at a bookstore where we had a terrific story hour program every week that often included costumed “special guests.” Some of those were professional costumes on loan from publishers — The Cat in the Hat, Little Bear, the mouse from If You Give a Mouse a Cookie — and some of those were ones we made ourselves.

Ours were pretty darned good. We made the Jafar costume for our “Disney Day” at the bookstore, an event that was such a big hit that we got invited to do crowd-work at a charity event for children’s cancer research. Me and the guy playing Aladdin got a real work-out at that event with both of us mobbed for two hours by kids delighting in foiling my attempts to capture the Street Rat. (The Philadelphia Eagles Cheerleaders were also at that event and gathered backstage with the rest of us before we were all announced as “special guests.” So there I was, single and in my 20s, hanging out for half an hour with the Eagles cheerleaders … while dressed as Jafar.)

That costume got retired after we got the cease and desist letter from Disney’s lawyers and it was later redesigned and repurposed by friends doing a production of Superstar.

Anyway, Bowen Yang’s Jafar costume is almost as good as mine was: