Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief(118)
Hubbard occasionally moderated his stance, although he never entirely repudiated or discarded his prejudice. In 1952, he said, “Homosexuality is about as serious as sneezes.” In 1965, he refers in an executive letter to a “squirrel” who, he says, “was sacked for homosexuality and theft.” Another disaffected Scientologist, Hubbard notes in the same letter, “is a set-up for an arrest as a homosexual.” Two years later, when social attitudes toward gays were slowly changing, he declared, “It has never been any part of my plans to regulate or attempt to regulate the private lives of individuals.” However, because everything Hubbard wrote is sacrosanct in the church, these early views are indelibly fixed in the minds of many Scientologists. Long after the founder’s death it was still generally believed that auditing would “sort out” homosexuality. Gays in the church were frequently pressed to buy courses or take additional auditing in order to handle their condition.
The ambivalence in the church over the question of sexual orientation is evident in its treatment of Travolta. Over the years, the church has acted to protect his reputation. Marty Rathbun has said there were many allegations that he helped “to make go away.” He sometimes worked in concert with Travolta’s attorneys, attempting to keep stories out of the press. In 2003, a gay artist, Michael Pattinson, sued the church, Travolta, and more than twenty other individuals, claiming that the star had been held up as an example of how Scientology can cure homosexuality. Pattinson said that he spent twenty-five years in the church, and half a million dollars, trying to change his sexual orientation, without success. (That case was voluntarily withdrawn following an avalanche of countersuits. Both Pattinson and his attorney say they were driven into bankruptcy.)
Haggis identified with homosexuals because they were a minority. They were the underdogs. They were also two of his daughters. The backers of Proposition 8 were using scare tactics to drive their campaign, claiming that homosexuals were going to take over the schools and teach people to be gay. Lauren Haggis actually heard people saying that. Then someone pointed her to a website that listed the proposition’s backers. The Church of Scientology of San Diego was on the list. “I was just floored,” she said. “And so I sent an e-mail to my sisters and my dad saying, um, what’s going on?”
Haggis began peppering Tommy Davis with e-mails, demanding that the church support efforts to reverse the marriage ban. “I am going to an anti Prop 8 rally in a couple of hours,” he wrote on November 11, 2008, a week after the initiative passed with 52 percent of the state’s voters. “When can we expect the public statement?” Davis responded with a proposed letter that would go to the San Diego media, saying that the church had been “erroneously listed among the supporters of Proposition 8.” “ ‘Erroneous’ doesn’t cut it,” Haggis fired back. “The church may have had the luxury of not taking a position on this issue before, but after taking a position, even erroneously, it can no longer stand neutral.” He demanded that the church openly declare itself in favor of gay rights. “Anything less won’t do.”
Davis stopped responding. When Haggis prodded him again, Davis admitted that the correction to the San Diego media was never actually sent. “To be honest I was dismayed when our emails (which I thought were communications between us) were being cc’d to your daughters,” he wrote. Davis was frustrated because, as he explained to Haggis, the church avoids taking political stances.1 Davis insisted that it wasn’t the “church” in San Diego that adopted a position against Prop 8. “It was one guy who somehow got it in his head it would be a neat idea and put Church of Scientology San Diego on the list,” Davis insisted. “When I found out, I had it removed from the list.”
As far as Davis was concerned, that should have been the end of the matter. Any further actions on the part of the church would only call attention to a mistaken position on an issue that the church wanted to go away. “Paul, I’ve received no press inquiries,” he said. “If I were to make a statement on this it would actually bring more attention to the subject than if we leave it be.”
But Haggis refused to let the matter drop. “This is not a PR issue, it is a moral issue,” he wrote in February 2009. “Standing neutral is not an option.”
In the final note of this exchange, Haggis conceded, “You were right: nothing happened—it didn’t flap—at least not very much. But I feel we shamed ourselves.”
Since Haggis’s children had been copied on the correspondence with Davis, it helped clarify Lauren’s stance with the church. At first, Davis’s responses gave her hope, but then she realized, “They’re just trying to minimize it as much as possible.” After that, “I was totally done with the church.”
The experience also helped her to see her father in a different light. “It’s like night and day from when I first moved in with him,” she said. “I didn’t know that my dad loved me.”
[page]
BECAUSE HAGGIS STOPPED COMPLAINING, Davis felt that the issue had been laid to rest. But, far from putting the matter behind him, Haggis began an investigation into the church. His inquiry, much of it conducted online, echoed the actions of the lead character he was writing for Russell Crowe in The Next Three Days, who goes on the Internet to research a way to break his wife out of jail.
What is so striking about Haggis’s investigation is that few prominent figures attached to the Church of Scientology have actually looked into the charges that have surrounded their institution for many years. The church discourages such examination, telling its members that negative articles are “entheta” and will only cause spiritual upset. In 1996, the church sent CDs to members to help them build their own websites, which would then link them to the Scientology site; included in the software was a filter that would block any sites containing material that vilified the church or revealed esoteric doctrines. Keywords that triggered the censorship were Xenu, OT III, and the names of prominent Scientology critics.