Scientology's Leaflet

[ First Draft - Revision #1 - Revision #2 ]

This is the leaflet passed out by Toronto Scientologists at anti-Scientology pickets. The leaflet has undergone two revisions since it was first used. The first two scans are by me, while the third scan is by Kaeli. The links to the scans are just above, and I'll comment on the interesting points below:

General

This leaflet claims is that Scientology & its membership "has been subject to a hate campaign conducted internationally via the Internet." As I (and others) have noted before, this isn't true. In Canada, pickets motivated by hate are illegal, and get shut down by the police (more on an actual hate-motivated picket here). There have been off-duty police officers (which Scientology *has to* pay for due to its members past picket-handling misbehaviour) at pickets for years now. There are several websites, including this one, where the pickets (and Scientology) are discussed at length. I personally delivered all the Notice of Demonstration forms for the 1999 pickets, signed by me with my home address and phone number, to the Toronto Police. It's fairly obvious (it *should* be obvious, I won't speculate as to why the person who wrote these leaflets didn't figure it out) that these pickets aren't part of any "hate campaign", or I and other picketers wouldn't still be picketing, passing out leaflets, or maintaining websites like this one.

As to the specific points raised in this leaflet:

Pictures. No, the pictures were not taken "surreptitiously". It's hard to be surreptitious in your picture taking when the pictures get posted to the internet (examples and links to pictures here, and here). Yes, we have wondered which Scientologists would match up with the names listed on Scientology's own partial list of Canadian Scientologists. [Interestingly enough, it seems that the criminally convicted Jacqui Matz has been counter-leafleting at pickets, which rather puts the lie to Scientology's contention that the Breach of Trust crimes were committed by rogue members who were subsequently purged from Scientology's membership ranks.]

Picket dates: All the past Toronto pickets are listed here. I don't view Scientology as particularly religious, and I certainly don't see anything wrong with pointing out how Hubbard was a bigamist and an unindicted co-conspirator on his birthday.

False accusations: Um, nope. Here's the leaflets we pass out. As we often point out, if we were spreading lies about Scientology and Scientologists, the pickets would be shut down. See above for my comments on the "create a climate of intolerance" bit.

And finally, this silly quote: "Freedom of speech does not include the right to incite hatred." Of course it doesn't. That's why there are still anti-Scientology pickets in Toronto after almost four years of picketing. If picketers were in fact "incit(ing) hatred", the pickets would long since have been shut down.

First Draft

Yes, there are only three pages here. The fourth page was blank, with the leaflet folded in book fashion.

Revision #1

New layout! From the top left, clockwise, the pictures are of: me, Gregg Hagglund, Alan Barclay, and Ron Sharp. Note how the author of this leaflet has made some efforts to make us all look suppressive (Scientology word, as in one of the 2% of people who only want to suppress all that is good). Note how Gregg Hagglund was photographed sucking on a Werther's candy (he was in the process of quitting smoking), which makes him look especially sinister. For better pictures of Gregg, click here.

Revision #2

Quick picture layout fiddling. I wonder if the change in order represents how important the leaflet author thinks each individual picketer is? In 1999 when Revision #1 came out I had signed all the Notice of Demonstration forms. In 2000 Gregg signed them all, but Ron Sharp organized a few pickets. Also notice how the other three have new pictures, but my picture is just the previous picture cropped and resized to make it look like there's a new picture of me. (The cult doesn't have an updated picture of me because I moved to Nova Scotia some time ago.)