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PASTOR'S REPORT, July 30, 1979
Page 8
resistance because the members were literally going to greet these people
from the receiver's office and the state as "liberators." And yet the
Church was big enough to be able to pay out a ton of money in fees which
was important for the receiver. And also "big enough" in the sense that
if the state were to actually succeed in accomplishing its will, this would
set a precedent.
First Amendment Begins With Freedom of Religion
In talking to the press, what I say is varied. If the press has been
accusatory in tone and has missed by a mile what I thought the facts were,
I thought it was important to put the press in its place because I thought
they were very shortsighted in not realizing that the First Amendment begins
with freedom of religion, not freedom of press. And as I told them in the
/court's? corridors the very first week in January when this whole thing
broke, they cry like stuck pigs where their own First Amendment rights are
concerned. And sure enough since then, in the last four or five months,
the U.S. Supreme Court has been kicking them around and they have literally
been crying on the front pages of the newspapers, on the television net
works, and on the editorial pages as well.
But that is the aspect of it that is hard to get people today excited
about--the First Amendment. I've told the newspaper people and the media
that when this country was founded two hundred years ago, people were very
concerned about the First Amendment. Because so much bloodshed has occurred
over matters of religion. So much persecution has taken place over ��t�ers
of religion. Wars almost invariably have been fought over matters of
religion. And the people who established this country two hundred years
ago were determined to have no state interference with anyone's religious
beliefs. They were determined to have no state establishment as was the
case in England. And God and religion were very important to these people
--maybe not each person to the same degree, but certainly no one would
have thought of publishing a TIME magazine in 1790 stating, "Is God Dead?"
That would never have occurred to anybody. They were quite sure God was
alive and that they were quite accountable to Him.
Today we live in a different society, and although we are very much con
cerned about the abridgment of our religious freedoms, not everybody is
all that excited about it. So that is a problem we are forced to contend
with constantly.
Yet in all of this we have an anomaly� Our most successful ad--the ad that
we designed to bring to the public certain facts about the lawsuit--was
the one that stated, "We have nothing to hide but much to protect!" By
��at Mr. Armstrong meant we literally had nothing to hide because that has
never been our approach to begin with before the lawsuit. We have been
a very open institution, much more open than the law requires us to be,
much more open than most churches are. Mr. Armstrong, in a way, is like
the lover who wears his heart on his sleeve. He is always telling people
just about everything that comes to his mind and he himself has said he
would rather err on the side of being, shall we say, too willing to reveal
things about himself and about the institution than to be secretive. And
as a consequence for us now, to be in a position of prote�ting our First
Amendment rights and everybody's First Amendment riqhts {by resistinq the
setting of a wrong precedent7, while the state accuses us of hiding some
thing, creates somewhat of
an
a�omaly.