The San Francisco Bay Area is home to people of many religions. Among them are many thousands of Scientologists, who frequent churches in San Jose, San Francisco, Mountain View and Los Gatos. They are active people, many of whom work long hours, study at their church in the evenings, and volunteer in their communities on the weekends. This is typical as they apply the tools of Scientology to become more awake, aware and able to handle whatever life throws at them. I know many of them. What they can accomplish in a short span of time is extraordinary.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the news media of a town attacks its own people, as is the case with The Mercury News and the Scientologists of the Bay Area. They employ a writer, Martha Ross, who has managed to smear the church over 40 times in the last eight years. She has been told by others and by me personally that she should just come to our church and see what it’s all about. She never does. She hides behind the internet, using the same bigots and haters as her sources, over and over again. Mercury News editors, holding a standard of zero accountability, continue to publish her slander. And when asked by Scientologists to address it, they don’t respond.
Who exactly do they think they represent?
This is an area with one of the highest concentrations of Scientologists in the world. Martha Ross and The Mercury News ignore the members of their own community who are right under their noses, IN THEIR OWN TOWN, and continually deal them a slap in the face.
Who exactly do they think they represent?
With easy access to so many Scientologists and to our partners in the interfaith community with whom we work, this newspaper would be wise to start actually representing religious communities in the Bay Area and drop their allegiance to haters on the internet fringe.