Cancellation Was Discrimination

This letter is in regard to the Oct. 14 article, “School Drops Assembly Because of Group’s Scientology Link.”

Isn’t it amazing how some people can lapse into religious bigotry and discrimination without even recognizing it?

Per the contents of Sam Enriquez’s article, the group known as Cry Out apparently has an excellent program for interesting and educating our schoolchildren regarding environmental and conservation issues. The program includes skits, music and a 48-page color booklet on recycling. Educators and parents lauded the program as “very entertaining” and said “the program itself is great.”

Shame on the Sherman Oaks School’s principal, Grace Snipper, for canceling an assembly appearance by Cry Out, and denying her students the benefits of this superior program, upon learning that the theme song for the group was written by L. Ron Hubbard and that the group’s educational booklet on “The Benefits of Recycling and Other Forms of Conservation” was published by Author Services, the literary agency for Hubbard.

Shame also on school board member Roberta Weintraub for backing up Snipper instead of censuring her knee-jerk prejudice upon hearing the dreaded “S” word (Scientology). I’m sure Weintraub remembers when, not so many years ago, the dreaded “J” word (Judaism) would have precluded a similar group activity in some schools in this country.

Are we to insist that because a person is a Scientologist he or she has no right to participate with others in handling the problems that confront our society?

Are we to require individuals or groups involved in such activities on a secular level to declare beforehand their religious preference or affiliation and thereafter wait, cap in hand, on some official’s doorstep to see if their religion is on the “acceptable” list?

And if Scientologists as individuals and in their groups recognize that they share mutual problems and concerns with this area’s population and humanity as a whole, are they to be denied the right to contribute? No! To do so is foolishness! To do so is also politics at its worst, doling out and denying position and power to protect the status quo rather than to get a job at hand done for the benefit of all!

The article quoted an appropriate passage from L. Ron Hubbard’s song, “Cry Out”:

“To hell with those whose carelessness in pollution is expressed, to hell with forced politics, where victory is only death.”

GARY A. BROWN, Tujunga