DETROIT, MI – Whenever the American people try to curtail abortion or maintain marriage laws, the followers of Satan will be there to fight back, promises the national spokesman for the Satanic Temple.

“Lucien Greaves” told Detroit's Metro Times that he would like to help women avoid complying with pro-life laws by saying abortion restrictions violate their Satanic religious beliefs. He added that gay “marriage” is a Satanic “sacrament.”

He said Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican from the party's moderate business wing, “has been trying to make it untenable for women to terminate a pregnancy.” A bill that Snyder signed – which requires the state's abortion facilities to upgrade their health and safety standards, properly dispose of aborted babies, and assure that women were not coerced into abortion – t ook effect last Easter . Another, requiring people to specifically opt into plans covering abortion, became law in March.

He had previously signed a law requiring that doctors allow women the opportunity to see an image of their children during ultrasounds administered before an abortion.

“We feel we should protect women from superfluous procedures like the transvaginal ultrasound, with [a] religious exemption,” Greaves said. The bill in question did not mandate that doctors perform transvaginal ultrasounds, although abortionists regularly perform transvaginal ultrasounds during the abortion process.

Greaves told the website Vice.com, far from anti-social teenage hoodlums, his Luciferian followers are “civic-minded, socially responsible Satanists.”

“One of the things we felt strongly about is gay rights,” Greaves said.

Snyder, whom he dubbed an “idiot governor,” has allowed “his loathing of homosexuals to trump his adhesion [sic] to the Constitution,” he said. “To us, marriage is a sacrament. We recognize it, and we think the state would have to recognize the marriage on religious liberty grounds.”

He said he would personally like to conduct such ceremonies in Michigan, where Judge Bernard Friedman struck down the state's marriage protection amendment in March.

The Satanic Temple's affirmation of abortion and redefining marriage “perhaps accidentally affirm the position of many in the pro-life movement that assaults on innocent human life and the family are demonic in origin,” Adam Cassandra, communications manager of Human Life International, told LifeSiteNews.

“As Pope Francis has so often pointed out, Satan really exists,” he said. “Even as they advocate for ‘justice’ and ‘rights,' they identify with the one who has been the source of all evil and deception throughout human history.”

At times, some liberal progressives have invoked demonic forces in their lobbying efforts. Last July, a group of abortion supporters chanted “Hail Satan!” while pro-life Christians sang “Amazing Grace” at the Texas statehouse before the passage of that state's ban on abortions after 20 weeks.

“This move by the Satanic Temple simply makes this argument that there’s some deception or evil behind the worldwide attack on preborn life and marriage that much stronger,” Cassandra told LifeSiteNews.

Greaves and his disciples of darkness have made headlines all over the country – threatening to bring Satanic prayer to public schools, seeking to erect statues of the devil on public property, and holding a Black Mass at Harvard.

Greaves, who was born Doug Mesner, said despite branding his organization The Satanic Temple, originally there was no organization, no temple, and its leaders did not actually believe in Satan.

“While the original thinking was that the Satanic Temple needed to hold to some belief in a supernatural entity known as 'Satan,' none of us truly believed that,” Mesner told Vice.com. Friends had recruited him because he spent his years at Harvard studying conspiracy theories, including fanciful tales of Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA), he said.

They hoped to spoof religious freedom arguments by applying them to Satan-worshipers, then release a documentary about their exploits. Mesner was hired to be their spokesman, and Lucien Greaves was born.

The “Temple” publicly welcomed Florida Gov. Rick Scott's decision to sign H.B. 98 allowing prayer in schools, “ensuring that children who might otherwise never learn of the Satanic creed could be exposed to it in the classroom.”

“The United States is a nation based upon religious pluralism,” Greaves said.

The proposed satanic statue for Oklahoma's Senate.

After Oklahoma decided to erect a monument of the Ten Commandments on the Statehouse lawn, Greaves and his followers began taking donations to place a statue of Satan surrounded by adoring children to place alongside it. Greaves told Fox News last month the group had already pocketed $20,000 with the stunt.

The temple also scheduled a “reenactment” of a Satanic Black Mass at Harvard University in May. However, the event was purportedly canceled after Harvard President Drew Faust called the action “flagrantly disrespectful and inflammatory,” taking part in a Eucharistic procession to oppose the potential desecration of the Host.

Authorities in Mississippi charged Mesner with desecrating a cemetery after he and his followers conducted a “Pink Mass” in Magnolia Cemetery in Meridian, over the grave of Catherine Johnston, the mother of Westboro Baptist Church founder Fred Phelps Jr. The ritual would purportedly turn her spirit into a lesbian in the afterlife. Mesner posted photographs of the ceremony, which included a picture of him rubbing his genitals on her tombstone, last July.

“You travel a thousand miles to come to a place and do this type of act on a person's grave and you claim it is for love?” the cemetery's owner, Bill Arlinghaus, told the Meridian (Mississippi) Star. “These people are hypocrites. There was nothing but hate behind this.”

But Greaves gradually graduated from graveside antics.

He said the Satanic Temple's current goal is to have lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and lamented that the Satanic religion has “absolutely no political influence, no known agenda, no advocacy whatsoever.”

His group is now “setting up a legal fund,” he told Vice.

The documentary has long since been jettisoned, he claimed. “We have no clearly defined film project regarding the Satanic Temple in the works to speak of. The idea of a film has become secondary, at best.”

Trying to make real political headway promoting abortion and the acceptance of homosexuality proved more alluring, and more consequential, for the Devil and his putative followers.