I’ve done my fair share of ranting about Scientology, be it about Tom Cruise’s aggressive and arrogant antipsychiatry nuttiness a couple of years ago or the very recent piece I wrote about the disturbing and idiotically conceived anti-psychiatry museum run by the Church of Scientology. The Church of Scientology is, of course, a target-rich environment, given the sheer nuttiness of it all. Indeed, there’d be nothing other than laughter from me if Scientology didn’t push a rabid anti-psychiatry pseudoscience in the name of religion and if it didn’t go after its critics with the tenacity of a rabid Rottweiler.
Although, among famous Scientologists, Tom Cruise gets under my skin in a major way, given his intentionally confrontational and ignorant rants about psychiatry, John Travolta never bothered me that much. He always seemed a lot more genial and low-key and not nearly as obnoxious about his religion as Tom Cruise. True, I did once take him to task for some stupid things he said about “environmental toxins,” but in general Travolta never inspired the loathing in me that Cruise has managed to do.
June 19, 2007 — JOHN Travolta blames Virginia Tech, Columbine and all the other tragic school shootings not on the psychos who committed the heinous acts – but on psychiatric drugs. “I still think that if you analyze most of the school shootings, it is not gun control. It is [psychotropic] drugs at the bottom of it,” Travolta told W. But the “Hairspray” film star won’t be jumping on couches over the issue or attacking Matt Lauer as his fellow Scientologist, Tom Cruise, did last year: “I don’t disagree with anything Tom says. How would I have presented it? Maybe differently than how he did, but it doesn’t matter.”
That’s right; you’ve got it. It wasn’t mental illness that was responsible for the shooter’s rampage at Virginia Tech, it was pyschiatric drugs! I guess it’s time to lump Travolta into the same category as the people who blamed the Virginia Tech shootings on atheism and evolution, vaccines, race-mixing, or any number of other personal hobby horses.
Travolta is a reminder. While it may be true that not all Scientologists are as upfront about pushing the idiocy of their religion as Tom Cruise, that is no reason not to look at more “reasonable” or “amiable” Scientologists with less suspicion. If a person is a committed Scientologist, even if that person is apparently intelligent and amiable, he will share the same anti-scientific beliefs as Tom Cruise. Apparently Travolta has recovered from his critically low e-meter reading, because he’s now dishing out the antipsychiatry woo with the best of the Scientologists.
(Via D-Listed. Yeah, I admit it. I read D-Listed from time to time. Deal with it.)
