From: bobsbarn@tiac.net (Robert S. Minton)
Newsgroups: alt.religion.scientology
Subject: Letter From NH Senator Gregg
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 23:56:30 GMT

In reply to my letter to Senator Gregg of Jan 26 I received the following letter on Feb 12th:

February 7, 1996

Thank you for passing along your opinions and concerns regarding the Church of Scientology. I have forwarded a copy of your letter to the Department of Justice for their review. I will get back in touch with you when I receive their response.

Again, I appreciate hearing from you. If you should have any further questions or suggestions, please let me know.

Sincerely,
Judd Gregg
U.S. Senator

It‘s only a start for me because I care about the victims of the scienos. I only wish I had cared sooner and maybe I could have been helpful in keeping the scienos, their hired lawyers and the justice system in the US from stripping Gerry Armstrong of each and every right and freedom we all take for granted.

WIRED March 96 issue 4.03, pg.86 has an article, “Don’t Mourn, Organize” by Simon Davies, Director of the London-based Privacy International (davies@pntint.demon.co.uk) which is sub titled “While the politicos have been raping the Constitution, netizens have been preaching to the choir.”

The article focuses on the CDA and the telcom reforms but a few brief excerpts that I think have relevance to ars:

Congress and the White House have come to believe that the Net is use- less as a political weapon-and that its users are incapable of organized political resistance. lf netizens want to stem the hemmorage of remaining freedoms, this passive stance must change-and fast.

Yet all that impassioned ASCII amounted to little more than a digital wank-off session, as netizens wasted time preaching to the converted. Netizens have confused technological wizardry with political might. But history proves that the death of freedom comes about more through apathy than conspiratorial tyranny.

Former House Speaker TIP O’Neill once observed that all politics are local. it’s time for Net users to discard their grand futuristic rhetoric and rediscover the lost arts of letter writing, and lobbying by telephone. We may live in a brave new world, but some principles of political action don’t go out of style.

Talk about preaching to the choir-vast energies are expended here to a largely converted audience. lf those energies could also be channeled in a more organized political way to expose the abuses to freedom and liberty committed by scienos throughout the world just maybe their demise as we now know them will occur sooner rather than latter.

I think we need to go out of our way to welcome the Andrew Greenberg’s of the world into this effort (back in his case) on our side rather than push them away by abusing them because we don’t like their stance or because they have stepped on fragile egos in this group. ARS needs friends not enemies. Every enemy of ARS is a friend of the scienos because we have taken a soapbox away from them.

I see some point to countering the lies posted to ARS by the scienos but sometimes the posters here are obsessed with a thread which goes on and on. That energy can surely be channeled more productively to expose the scienos for what they do and what they are.

Remember that in Germany and the Netherlands, it only took one or two elected officials to take enough interests in the scienos abuses to begin the processes that will eventually stop their abuses in those countries and no doubt other European neighbors.

I volunteer to help, but l’m no organizer at least not yet. Maybe we need to have a discussion for all to see as to how to go about creating a meaningful lobby to neutralize the political influence that the scienos buy. Any ideas?

When we take to the streets on March 9th are we going to do better than the few hundred protesters worldwide back in September? How about more than a dozen in Boston? How about a meaningful number of pickets in Clearwater? Or, is this all just one more ASCII wank-off?