Why has Scientology sometimes been involved in court
battles?
To protect the rights of our churches and parishioners.
The Church has gone to court a number of times to defend against encroachment of our civil and First Amendment rights.
The majority of this litigation, most of which started in the early to mid 1980s, has since concluded. The result has been significant court decisions in the United States and abroad which have fully recognized the religious nature of Scientology and which have upheld the rights of the Church and its parishioners to practice their religion. These are rulings which benefit all religions.
A number of cases were brought against the Church by unscrupulous individuals who tried to exploit the fact that the latent prejudices of courts and juries can be inflamed against new and unfamiliar religions and can lead to large, but undeserved sums of cash.
A number of people who filed such opportunistic suits later admitted they made allegations just for money or that they were the beneficiaries of covert government support which allowed the litigation to protract. The simple truth of the matter is that opportunistic lawsuits premised on false allegations and fueled by greed have all but disappeared in the wake of scores of favorable First Amendment judicial decisions, and, finally, the Internal Revenue Service’s 1993 determination fully recognizing the religious nature of the Church and its tax exempt status. Only the false assertions of a malignant but stubborn few seek to perpetrate falsities long since examined by the IRS and found to be unsubstantiated.
The IRS decision followed the most exhaustive examination of any organization ever undertaken by that agency. All of the allegations brought by these civil litigants were not only fully investigated as part of that examination but wholly dismissed.
publicrelations@scientology.net