Canadian director leaves L. Ron Hubbard’s church over gay-bashing
Paul Haggis, the Canadian writer-director (Crash) who has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after writers, has made a public break with the Church of Scientology. According to Scientology official spokesman Tommy Davis, he gave two reasons for leaving the movement. One was the support of their San Diego chapter for Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that banned gay marriage, as well as the refusal of the Church’s leadership to denounce the chapter’s stance. Haggis wrote that he “could not, in good conscience, be a member of an organization where gay-bashing was tolerated.” Haggis’s other objection was to Scientology ordering him and his wife to have no further contact with her parents “because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church.” His wife stopped seeing her parents for a year and a half. Upset at this “policy of disconnection” and Davis’s denial that it exists, Haggis ended the letter with the words “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology,” making him one of the few celebrity Scientologists to publicly break with the organization.