Subject:	Globe and Mail: Xenu, Pickets and Ethics, oh my!
Author:	Gregg Hagglund <elrond@cgo.wave.ca>
Date:	1999/02/24
Forum:	alt.religion.scientology
Msg-ID:	<elrond-2402991225440001 @cgowave-45-04.cgocable.net>

The Globe and Mail, February 24, 1999.
pg 3, lower half.

[Headline]
Two-year battle reveals Scientologists as vigorous opponents.

- Oakville man discovers cost of taking on church as protest elicits. picketing of his home, unsolicited 'visit' to aging parents

{Photo)
Gregg Hagglund left, has been protesting outside the Church of Scientology's Toronto office for two years, in response,

(Photo)
his home has been the target of picketing by placard-carrying members of the church, one of whom described Mr. Hagglund as a practising pagan.

TIMOTHY APPLEBY
The Globe and Mail

First came the pickets. Then an odd letter to a Crown attorney. But it was the unwanted visit to his bewildered, aging parents that really annoyed Gregg Hagglund, self proclaimed priest of "an obscure New Age faith."

When the Church of Scientology is attacked, Mr.Hagglund's family and neighbors have learned to their surprise and dismay, it does not turn the other cheek.

The result is one of the more bizarre running battles the often controversial organization has waged since being founded in the 1950s by the late U.S. science-fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard.

In one corner is a small band of critics that include Mr. Hagglund, a 48-year-old newspaper distributor from Oakville, west of Toronto.

In the other is an organization that describes itself as a religion but which Mr. Hagglund and his friends regard as merely a business.

For two years Scientology's Yonge Street headquarters has been the target of picketing by Mr. Hagglund and others. His protests have also taken him to Clearwater, Fla., where Scientology's U.S. parent is facing criminal charges in the 1995 death of a member.

On the Internet, meanwhile, a flood of [anti]-Scientology messages and documents largely unread by Scientologists, whose access to cyberspace is screened by leaders is constantly posted and updated by Mr. Hagglund and others.

Scientology has fought back.

To the astonishment of Mr. Hagglund's neighbours, his home has been counterpicketed several times by Scientologists who have stuffed leaflets in mailboxes and paraded along the sidewalk with signs accusing him of bigotry.

"I couldn't believe it," said Shelly Ferguson, who lives five doors ' down. "Gregg had warned us they were going to picket and we'd been wondering, 'Who's crazier, Gregg or these people?'" Then the truck rolls up with the pickets, and I went, 'Oh, Gregg's not nuts. These people are really off the deep end.' "

Then Scientology widened the battleground.

Last May, Mr. Hagglund's 19-year-old son Christopher was arrested on a drug charge, accused of selling cannabis and hallucination-inducing psilocybin mushrooms to high-school students.

The charge, which Christopher Hagglund denies, remains before the courts. In October, an odd wrinkle appeared:

Veteran Toronto Scientologist Peter Ramsay wrote to Halton Crown attorney Bob Lush, complaining about the older Mr. Hagglund's anti-Scientology activities and suggesting that his son's plight might be connected to the fact that his father practises a religion akin to witchcraft.

Who's the religious bigot? Scientology writes to an attorney (with the apparent intention of influencing the case) to malign Greg's religion!

Mr. Lush shrugs at the strange letter. "As far as I'm concerned, it's totally immaterial. It obviously reflected a peeing match going on between these people for some time."

Then, earlier this month, two Scientologists — Toronto church spokesman Al Buttnor and Ottawa official Cathie Mann — paid Mr. Hagglund's parents a visit at their Ottawa home.

Wilma Hagglund, in her 80s, did not let them in. But she was mindful of Scientology's reputation as a vigorous opponent, and the encounter left her unnerved.

"I told them that what my son did was his own business and I didn't want anything to do with it, and they went away."

Why the visit?

"I think you know why," Mr. Buttnor said. "It has to do with hatred."

Why, indeed. Mr. Hagglund is not a misbehaving child in need of parental discipline. But Mr. Buttnor is correct, it does have to do with hatred — the hatred of a "church" for its critics.

Ms. Mann who once tried to pay a similar visit to Mr. Hagglund's brother, said the mission "was to just go and see if we could maybe talk to Hagglund's parents just to see if we could get a sense of why he is doing this and if there's some way they could help. It wasn't to upset them at all, and I felt very bad because Mrs. Hagglund … was very upset."

As for the letter to Mr. Lush, Mr. Buttnor says he and the church had nothing to do with writing it. "Mr. Ramsay is free to do what he wants as a Canadian citizen. "

Mr. Ramsay, a Scientologist since 1972, did not return phone calls.

The letter accuses Mr. Hagglund of being "a practising pagan," and adds: "I don't think you would disagree that when a young man is charged with trafficking in drugs and the charges are found to be true, that something is awfully wrong!"

Mr. Hagglund acknowledges that he holds unusual religious beliefs. He and his wife have two businesses legally registered as the Temple At'L'An and the Masts of White Light, which have few members and no income. Mr. Hagglund says he had a "personal revelation" that has become a belief in a benevolent Creator, in spiritual immortality and in an afterlife.

He traces his dislike for Scientology to what he has heard of other people's bad experiences with the group, especially with its practice of "auditing", Scientology's central rite, wherein believers try to purge themselves of harmful past experiences, with the aid of a device resembling a lie detector.

"I started out [protesting] because I found out that Scientology was hurting people — its own people — and I wanted to find out why. "

Mr. Buttnor, on the other hand, perceives Mr. Hagglund and his ilk as mean-minded bigots targeting one of the world's new religions, whose leaders sometimes liken their situation to that of Jews in Nazi Germany.

That's not the view of Detective Richard Kijewski of the Toronto Police Service's hate-crimes unit, long familiar with Scientology's running wars.

Mr. Hagglund's activities thus far involve criticism rather than hatred, Det. Kijewski said. "According to the definition in the [Criminal] Code, both groups have a right to demonstrate…. Whether this is going to escalate , I don't know."

{SideBar]

WHAT THEY BELIEVE

Firm believers in reincarnation, Scientologists hold that traumas experienced in other lives or on other planets are obstacles on the path to enlightenment, exorcised by a therapy-like process termed auditing.

To critics, that path is an expensive space fantasy created by a science-fiction writer who lost touch with reality.

Central to Scientology belief, though largely unmentioned, is the legend of galactic ruler Xenu, believed to have precipitated humankind's ills by an act of mass murder 75 million years ago.

The Xenu story first surfaced publicly in the 1980s in Los Angeles court documents. Scientology says the material has been grossly misunderstood.

Controversy is nothing new to Scientology, which says — to the scoffing of foes — it has millions of members worldwide.

For many years, and in many countries, it has been embroiled in legal tussles with opponents, who include a number of high-level defectors. Copyright violations on the Internet, where what Scientology calls its "sacred texts" have been aired, have been a particular focus.

Scientologists' access to cyberspace is restricted, spokesman Al Buttnor acknowledged. "There is material on the Internet that people at a certain level are not supposed to see."

The organization can pursue its critics in other ways. When a Boston Herald reporter wrote scathingly about Scientology last year, a private investigator was retained to question the reporter's ex-wife.

In Canada the church was fined $250,000 in 1992 for its role in espionage operations during the 1970s against the Ontario Attorney-General's Ministry, the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police the only church ever convicted of a criminal offence in this country.

In 1994, the group had to pay a record $1.6-million for libeling an Ontario Crown attorney.

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