Our friend and fellow journalist Mark Ebner alerted us last night to a fairly mindblowing statement posted on Twitter on Monday afternoon. The Legoland theme park in Carlsbad, California announced that it is donating $10,000 to the Scientology front group Youth for Human Rights, and in the name of actress Jenna Elfman.
The timing was apparently not an accident. Just minutes before that tweet was posted, Elfman had been the celebrity guest who helped Legoland California turn on the lights of its annual Christmas tree.
Early this morning we fired off an email to Legoland California media relations manager Julie Estrada to confirm the information in the tweet and to solicit an answer to the question, did Legoland have any idea that Youth for Human Rights is a Scientology front?
We’re going to guess that Legoland rewarded Elfman with a donation to the charity of her choice in return for helping them light their Christmas tree, and that Elfman, a longtime Scientologist, asked them to donate the money to Youth for Human Rights. (UPDATE: Yes, that seems to be the case. Video from Legoland California added…)
Youth for Human Rights International (YHRI) was founded in 2001 by Scientologist Dr. Mary Shuttleworth, who has also tried to push Scientology on the nation’s schools through the front group Applied Scholastics. Like other Church of Scientology front groups, YHRI pretends to have a benign purpose that has nothing to do with Scientology. In this case, YHRI is one of several groups under the umbrella United for Human Rights that has created videos and pamphlets based on the principles spelled out in a 1948 United Nations proclamation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
For some reason, Scientology never mentions in its materials that the Declaration was a project by Eleanor Roosevelt. It is a fine document, but many of its principles are uncontroversial in the developed world, such as the right to own property and the right to a fair trial.
Why would a Scientology front group spend money to tell American children that they have the right to own property or the right to move to another state?
The answer is the same as it is for all of Scientology’s front groups: To find a way to get kids talking about Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard and looking into the benefits of joining Scientology.
United for Human Rights is not an independent effort by a few concerned Scientologists. We’ve demonstrated how it’s a Church of Scientology master plan to reach the children of the world with its real message.
Don’t take our word for it. You can watch Church of Scientology International president Heber Jentzsch talk at a 2006 Scientology event for some 20 minutes about the church’s plan to use Youth for Human Rights to spread its influence into every nation on earth in a video we posted back in September.
The twisted logic of using Heber Jentzsch to talk about Scientology’s efforts in human rights is one of those times when words like “irony” and “hypocrisy” simply fail to express what’s going on. When you watch that 2006 video, you’re seeing a man who, since 2004, had been held in a literal prison for top Scientology executives known as “The Hole.” Yes, eyewitnesses place Heber Jentzsch in the Hole from about 2004 to at least 2009, and he had been pulled out of that prison just long enough to attend this 2006 event to talk about Scientology’s efforts in human rights around the world. It’s a neat example of what Scientology is doing on a larger scale with these efforts — using vague “good works” to distract attention from Scientology’s own failings concerning human rights.
There’s simply no doubt that Scientology works children long hours for virtually no pay, for example, and in 2009 that well-established fact aroused the interest of the FBI, which investigated Scientology for human trafficking allegations before giving up the investigation for complex reasons.
If Legoland goes through with the donation, it will be a significant one for Youth for Human Rights, which has no paid employees and spends most of its expenditures on videos and pamphlets and for holding conferences. YHRI is a nonprofit organization under the name United for Human Rights. The most recent tax return for UHR, for the year 2013, shows that it took in $81,943 that year. So a $10,000 donation would be a very significant one.
Also, UHR lists four persons as the organization’s officers. The director of UHR is Rubina Qureshi, who is also the president of the Association for Better Living and Education, Scientology’s umbrella group for its “good works” front groups, and an entity that is staffed only with Sea Organization workers, the super hard core Scientologists who sign billion-year contracts and work for pennies an hour.
The president of UHR is Mary Shuttleworth, the founder of the group and a longtime Scientologist promoter.
And the secretary of UHR is Humberto Fontana, a Sea Org employee and Office of Special Affairs operative who was mentioned here recently for his role in Scientology’s mishandling of the confinement and death of parishioner Lisa McPherson in 1995.
Yes, one of the Scientologists whose actions led to the gross snuffing out of Lisa McPherson’s human rights is an officer of Scientology’s front group that pretends to have concern for the human rights of children around the world.
Legoland, this is not a good look.
UPDATE: We received a response from Legoland California media relations manager Julie Estrada. Here’s what she sent us in an email…
“We invite our tree lighting guests, without prejudice, and provide a small donation to their charity of choice in appreciation of their participation.”
We had asked her if Legoland California was aware that Youth for Human Rights was a Scientology front, but we’re apparently not going to get an answer to that question.
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Babywatch, day thirteen: Lisa McPherson in Room 174
Heather Hoff remembered that things changed on Friday, December 1, 1995 because Lisa McPherson had begun to shit her bed.
Heather had been doing shifts in the caretaking of Lisa for several days, and had reported that Lisa had been very active and sometimes violent. But thirteen days into Lisa’s confinement, she began to undergo a transformation.
Janis Johnson, who was overseeing the other caretakers, also noticed it. After almost two weeks of eating almost nothing, Lisa McPherson was finally beginning to look different to her caretakers.
“I noticed that, you know, she was looking thinner to me. She was wearing like a tank top and shorts. And she looked noticeably thinner to me. And I said whoa, you know. But she was a lot calmer at that point,” Janis said about that Friday.
Calmer, and incontinent.
As Friday began, after midnight, Rita Boykin was trying to get Lisa to consume more valerian root capsules to make her drowsy. To get them into her, Rita came up with a concoction of orange juice, mashed banana, and a strawberry protein drink. She also noted that she needed to get a quart of water into Lisa to make up for how little fluid she’d been getting.
By five in the morning, Rita noted that she’d managed to get three of the valerian root capsules into Lisa.
“She will appear to be very cooperative — hold her mouth open, make eye contact, as if she is there, then close the back of her throat and not swallow,” Rita wrote in her report of the day. “Her voice becomes nasal and she mutters rather than pronounces her words properly. My idea of closing her nose so she has to swallow so she can breathe through her mouth is only marginally successful. She either swallows and breathes or she lets everything in her mouth come out.”
Like Heather, Rita noted that Lisa was urinating and defecating in her bed, and had to be cleaned multiple times. But in the morning, Lisa was noticeably stronger, she noted. Lisa was back to kicking things.
Rita complained that when Lisa became violent, another caretaker, Sylvia DeLavega, had gone “solid” — froze, and then sat in a corner and cried before she was able to help Rita feed Lisa, who was back to being combative.
“This morning she is deliberate and nasty — even evil,” Rita noted.
Later that morning, Janis Johnson gave Lisa two capsules of chloral hydrate (even though Heather had said Janis had decided to stop using it a couple of days earlier). Rita gave Lisa another capsule at noon and managed to get Lisa to sleep.
In the afternoon, Rita described a constant battle to get more capsules into Lisa to make her drowsy. “I gave her four valerian root caps…I’m giving her Cal-Mag and orange juice at every opportunity.” But Lisa wouldn’t sleep.
“She is wide awake, on the floor, bouncing, humming, and talking. I will be getting a couple of protein shakes for her shortly.”
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BOOK NOTES
We didn’t get a chance to include photos in our book, so we’ve posted them at a dedicated page. Reader Sookie put together a complete index and we’re hosting it here on the website. Copies of the paperback version of ‘The Unbreakable Miss Lovely’ are on sale at Amazon. The Kindle edition is also available, and shipping instantly.
Our book tour is concluded for now. (But you can re-experience it through this nifty interactive map!) We’ll let you know about future appearances. Previous events: Santa Barbara (5/16), Hollywood (5/17), Orange County (5/17), San Diego (5/20), San Francisco (5/22), New York (6/11), Chicago (6/20), Toronto (6/22), Clearwater (6/28), Washington DC (7/12), Hartford (7/14), Denver (7/17), Dallas (7/20), Houston (7/22), San Antonio (7/24), Austin (7/25), Paris (7/29), London (8/4), Boston (8/24), Phoenix (9/15), Cleveland (9/23), Minneapolis (9/24), Portland (9/27), Seattle (9/28), Vancouver BC (9/29), Sydney (10/23), Melbourne (10/25), Adelaide (10/28), Perth (10/30)
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Posted by Tony Ortega on December 1, 2015 at 07:00
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Learn about Scientology with our numerous series with experts…
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Jason Beghe | Tom DeVocht | Sara Goldberg | Paul Haggis | Mark “Marty” Rathbun | Mike Rinder | Spanky Taylor | Hana Whitfield
