Anonymous DC’s November raid, protesting the abusive practices of the Church of Scientology, was a small one over at the Ideal Org. I think we had around ten people in attendance. It’s understandable, though – we crashed their Ideal Org opening party only two weeks prior, and so a lot of folks probably needed time to recharge their batteries and such. But it’s okay – the place was absolutely dead, with only a few staff around, and I think we still managed to outnumber them, even with our small numbers. This raid also returned us to the four-hour raid length (we did eight-hour raids in October), and we also returned to our cooler-weather timeframe of 1-5 PM (we push the timeframe back a few hours in the peak of summer to avoid the worst of the heat in our masks).
This was pretty much standard fare for us, but we did have a few highlights. First of all, we had the cops called on us twice. First time was not long after I arrived:
And then again about 30 minutes before the end of our raid:
Note a constant here: Scientologists Sue Taylor and Sadie James. Almost always those two, too. That or Sylvia Stanard (who was not around this time). When are they going to figure out that they can’t get rid of us? Just because they consider us a nuisance does not mean that they can use the cops to have us hustled away. If we followed their logic, you see, that if people who have a legal right to be somewhere annoy you and you want them gone, I could call the police on Scientology and have them evicted from their building. Wouldn’t that be funny, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It just makes them look bad, and gives them a bad reputation for abusing the police.
I also ran into one of my coworkers while I was raiding. This time, I ran into Meredith, who was on her way to the office for a few minutes:
I’m holding a stack of You Found The Card cards, and handed Meredith one on her way out.
And perhaps the most shocking (but not surprising) moment of the raid was when a homeless gentleman came by looking for assistance. After he asked us for money (which we didn’t have), he said that he needed to “speak to a pastor”, and walked into the Ideal Org. We were really worried about him at that point, as who knew what Scientology might do with this man who didn’t seem entirely stable in the first place.
Now, if you were the Church of Scientology, and a homeless man came in looking for help, what would you do? Would you:
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A) Provide shelter or help the man find shelter
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B) Provide a meal for the man
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C) Offer spiritual guidance during his time of need
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D) Escort him out of the building and back onto the street
If you answered “D”, escort him out of the building and back onto the street, you are right. This is what happened after the homeless man entered the Ideal Org looking for help:
From what I saw, Sue Taylor herself did the honors in escorting him back out of the building. Presumably, once they realized he had no money to help line David Miscavige’s wallet, they had no use for him. Some “church” they are. Hopefully the man found assistance at one of the other nearby religious facilities, since Scientology sure as hell wasn’t going to give him any help.
So there you go. November’s raid was small but awesome nonetheless, and I count three epic fails on Scientology’s part.