Paul Haggis related another version of his narrative about leaving the Church for Alex Gibney’s “documentary”—one Mark Rathbun calls out as false, from his firsthand involvement.
You know, they have Alex Gibney saying that: “Paul Haggis’ daughters were openly harassed by Church members for being gay.” You know, I’ve been through the book three times now, there’s no evidence of that. I never heard of any evidence of that from Paul Haggis. They suffered a couple of slights from peers, is what the accusation was. But now they’re being “openly harassed,” because now this is a movie and we’re going to make this more dramatic, I guess.
And Gibney says, “Investigating further, Haggis discovered Church doctrine which characterized homosexuality as ‘a disease’ which only Hubbard’s teachings could cure.” It’s never categorized as a disease, unlike the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual] and the APA [American Psychiatric Association], who until the mid-‘70s had it as a mental disorder. It was not a disease. And I’ve been through this before, it’s a single characteristic to take into consideration in a series of 48 characteristics, that you must have a majority of those characteristics in order to be considered at a particular emotional tone which has particular connotations.
So, to conflate that into—and that’s written in 1951, and then there’s a subsequent body of written statements by L. Ron Hubbard that he didn’t give a cat’s ass—a rat’s ass about somebody’s sexuality. And it was firm Church policy that one wouldn’t be concerned about one’s sexuality.
That now becomes a “disease,” it’s been branded a disease, according to him. And by the way, again, it’s all in present time, taking a statement in 1950—25 years before the APA and mental health in general decided that it wasn’t a disease.
At 1:43:30 Paul Haggis says, “I can’t support an organization that doesn’t support human rights for everyone, so I wrote a letter resigning.” I mean, no, he didn’t. He wrote a letter resigning a year and a half after these—this dispute he had concerning a particular stance one church took on an issue. And he had aired all his disagreements on that and a year and a half later, for intervening reasons, which we’ve discussed, that had to do with embarrassment about things that were being said in the press, he then wrote a letter.
At 1:44 Paul Haggis says that his friends in Scientology said, “‘We need you to resign quietly’ and he said ‘I don’t do that. I don’t do quiet.’” Like, he’s John Wayne again, right. He’s just macho. Except that’s exactly what he did. And he went through a lot of different machinations to try to make it appear that he was doing it quietly. In fact, he involved me in it, plotted with Jason Beghe about these ways that he could use my media contacts to leak things to them so that he would have no causative....
In other words, he was taking extreme measures over several months to try to snipe from the weeds. I mean, he wanted to do it so that he wasn’t involved in it whatsoever and cause damage through the leaking of his letter. So, first of all, he didn’t tell them: “I don’t do that. I don’t do quiet.” He gave them the impression that he was going to do it quiet. He gave no impression that he was going to go out and announce this from the hilltops, right. So, this is a lie.
And then, his subsequent behavior, which is documented, showed that that’s exactly what he did. He did try to do it as quietly as he could with creating the greatest possible media impact against the Church.
