Picket Report 3/17/01 Things heat up in AZ
17 Mar 2001
bk-pettycrew@home.com (Bruce Pettycrew)

We had hoped to go to LA to picket for the Hubbard birthday weekend, but due to work pressures I had to stay in Phoenix. So, we visited the local org today.

Kathy and I picketed from 10:00 to 11:00 this morning. It was a beautiful spring day in Arizona, about 70 degrees and sunny.

There were 7 cars in the Mesa site parking lot when we arrived. Traffic was light, but we got a greater than average number of honks and responses.

At about 10:30 a man came out from the building and walked over to the sidewalk to talk to me. I just said "hello", and he responded with "you are an atheist and should not be picketing a church!". With that as a beginning, we "talked" for about 5 minutes before another man came out and told the first guy that "there was a phone call" for him.

During our conversation, the man, who claimed to be an OT 5, denied that OT3 had anything to do with "the Marcabs". So I pointed out the back of my "Scientology Kills" T-shirt with the direct quote from Hubbard about the Galactic Empire. He stated that he could be a Catholic and a Scientologist. I told him that I knew that Hubbard said that Catholicism came from "a madman" recalling the implants from Incident Two. He had no response for that. I also pointed out that the CoS strongly objects to "mixing practices" .

Kathy taped the whole confrontation, especially since the man several times tried to block me from walking on the sidewalk. I will post some stills from the video to alt.binaries.scientology later this week.