FALSEHOOD: SCIENTOLOGY IS CORRUPT, SINISTER AND DANGEROUS (from Justice
John Latey's 1984 decision in
Re: B and G, Wards)This falsehood comes from comments made about
Scientology
by Justice John Latey of the English High Court in June of 1984 in a case
captioned
Re: B and G, Wards. This was a custody case involving two pre-teenage
children,
which based its finding against the father exclusively on the fact that he was
a member of the Church of Scientology. In fact, Justice Latey admitted that
but
for the fact of his membership in the Church the father was the better parent
and better choice to raise the children. Nonetheless he awarded custody to the
mother, because of the "Scientology factor."A fair reading of that
decision
would lead one to believe that the Scientology issue had been vigorously
litigated
by both sides and Justice Latey's ruling was based on a full record on the
subject.
In fact, this trial was a domestic dispute over the custody of two minor
children.
The mother was not a Scientologist and the father was. The children had been
in
the custody of the father for five years of the divorce and the mother was
suing
to custody. The attorneys for the mother saw a way to prejudice the Court
against
the father by bombarding him with inflammatory allegations about Scientology,
which Justice Latey allowed them to do while the Church was precluded from the
proceedings and not allowed to defend itself. The father's case focused on his
qualities and record as a parent. In short, Scientology was blind-sided and
was
not defended, resulting in a decision that is simply wrong.
This decision by Justice
Latey is the perfect example of what happens when false "expert
testimony"
is presented in an unrestrained fashion and the party to whom it is directed
is
not present to be able to rebut. What began as a family law case involving the
custody of two children, ages 8 years and 10 years was catapulted into an
unbridled
attack on the religion of Scientology. At no time during the trial proceedings
was the Church represented by a single lawyer and thus could not defend
itself.Due
to the Church being unrepresented at trial, counsel for the mother was able to
get into evidence testimony from two so-called "expert witnesses"
who
truly were anything other than experts on the Scientology religion. One of
them
was a failed staff member who never did achieve the ethical standards of the
group
that he had earlier been accepted into and the other was a psychiatrist who
had
never set foot in a Scientology Church nor received one minute of counseling.
One
of these "experts" was Gerald Armstrong. Armstrong worked for the
Church
as a clerk. He left suddenly in December of 1981, stealing
thousands of pages of private documents belonging to L. Ron Hubbard. The
Church
was ultimately able to get the documents back, but not after years of
litigation.
A few months after his June 1984 testimony
in the UK, he hatched
a plot to seize the Church's assets in
collaboration
with agents of the Internal Revenue Service. When the Church found out
about
this, its attorneys obtained
permission from a Los Angeles police officer to conduct an investigation
into
Armstrong's plans. The
investigation
caught Armstrong on videotape
stating
that he intended to forge and then plant incriminating documents on Church
premises,
to be discovered in a subsequent raid. When challenged on how he would obtain
proof of the allegations he intended to make, he responded that "we don't
have to prove a goddamn thing. We don't have to prove shit. We just have to
allege
it."
As part of the same scheme, Armstrong
planned to subvert a senior Scientology executive
using sexual enticement in a scheme he titled "Operation Long
Prong."
This is documented both on video and in his own handwriting. Attached is his
handwritten
note as well as the transcript from the video.
Gerald Armstrong currently lives in Canada, having
fled the United States because there is a warrant
out for his arrest. He has been ordered to pay $650,000 to the Church and held
in contempt twice
for repeatedly contravening court orders concerning making outlandish
statements
to the media about L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology. He has 14 separate counts
of
contempt -- 28 days in jail and a $10,000 bond held over his head. If he
returns
to California, he will be arrested and have to serve his time.
Armstrong recently posted a message on the
Internet concerning a letter
he sent to Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War. In the letter, he offered
himself
to Hussein as a hostage in the Iraqi war. "If either side failed to
perform
any part of the agreement, the other side could execute me," he
concluded.
Armstrong makes clear in his posting that he did not think the letter to
Hussein
was a joke. He is deadly serious, and quite proudly republishes it and other
similar
writings.
To further demonstrate how out of touch he
is with reality, Armstrong had himself
photographed
by a newspaper naked in a newspaper while holding a globe to promote his
theories
of destroying all money.
The other "expert" was Dr. John Clark, a psychologist who had
never set foot in a Scientology church,
had not studied Scientology and had certainly never received any Scientology
counseling.
Clark is noted for his unique theory that religious belief or conviction is a
form of mental illness and he was in fact looking for the chemical or abnormal
brain cells which caused this. Clark's livelihood was supplemented by his
activities
as a hired "deprogrammer" -- which involves kidnapping, physical
restraint,
food and sleep deprivation in order to persuade someone to renounce their
religious
beliefs and affiliations. Clark did not confine his disdain for religion to
Scientology
and probably would have given equally poisoned testimony concerning the
Catholic,
Protestant or Jewish faiths.
Justice Latey very clearly overstepped his bounds in trying to put the
Scientology religion on trial within
a child custody dispute. This was recognized by the Court of Appeal which
reviewed
the Latey decision. That Court found that "it was unnecessary for the
judge
to have gone into the detail which he did . . ." Lord Justice Purchas
commented,
"It may not have been strictly necessary for Latey to have made
definitive
findings on collateral matters in the way that he did and in the terms that he
did. . . ." Justice Latey's prejudice against Scientology became so
pronounced
that even when he observed positive factors he transformed them into negative
findings. His conclusion that the children should not stay with the father
even
though but for the "Scientology factor" it would be in their best
interests,
is one example.
In another example, Justice Latey characterized the testimony of a young
man called by the father to testify
to the workability of Scientology as "a sad episode." "This
young
man," Justice Latey observed, "was greatly gifted and did
exceptionally
well at school and university." He had completed several Scientology
study
courses, which had clearly contributed to his success. Justice Latey, however,
turned the evidence on its head, finding that what it showed was someone
incapable
of criticizing Scientology. When the case went to the Court of Appeal, Lord
Justice
Purchas commented, "with respect to the learned judge I cannot wholly
follow
his judgment in relation to this witness" The British press was alarmed
by
the authoritarian nature of Justice Latey's judgment. One headline stated
that,
"His Lordship Plays God"
It is empirically true that a good way to judge something is by examining
its result. That is the tangible,
evident product of what was decided upon and done. In this instance a judge
ordered
that the two children who were the subject of this case be removed from their
father's house and turned over to their mother. This overturned a custody
arrangement
that had been in place for close to 6 years. The premise for this change was
exclusively
the false evidence given by false witnesses at a trial where the accused could
not defend itself. The result of this was a disaster. The son, who is now an
adult,
became a teenage drug addict while in the custody of his mother.
To illustrate the sickest irony of the whole situation, it was the
children's mother who, three years later,
requested that their son go back to England and live with his father as she
was
unable to handle him. Shortly after that the mother again contacted the father
and requested that she send their daughter to him in England as the daughter
had
been getting into all sorts of trouble. So while the natural laws shone
through,
the legal decision, out-dated, wrong and the cause of untold unhappiness can
and
does get used as a vehicle to ridicule a religion.
Finally, the unfairness of relying on Justice Latey's bigoted statements is
emphasized by the fact that
the ruling is not consistent with the current views about Scientology by the
English
High Court. In September 1998 a judgment was issued in another British custody
case involving a Scientologist (S.M.) and his two children, in which the judge
came to the opposite conclusion concerning Scientology. Here, the court made
it
clear that the beliefs of the Scientologist had nothing to do with the case
and
that the Scientologist was entitled to have his own religious belief and that
this had no bearing on the matter of custody.