Misogyny is described in Wikipedia as follows:
Misogyny /mɪ’sɒdʒɪni/ is the hatred or dislike of women or girls. Misogyny can be manifested in numerous ways, including sexual discrimination, denigration of women, violence against women, and sexual objectification of women. Misogyny has been characterised as a prominent feature of the mythologies of the ancient world as well as various religions. In addition, many influential Western philosophers have been described as misogynistic.
Misogyny within Scientology has been so prelavent that Wikipedia’s entry on the former includes a section on the latter:
Scientology
See also: Scientology and marriage
L. Ron Hubbard wrote the following passages in his 1965 book Scientology: A New Slant on Life:
“A society in which women are taught anything but the management of a family, the care of men, and the creation of the future generation is a society which is on its way out.”
“The historian can peg the point where a society begins its sharpest decline at the instant when women begin to take part, on an equal footing with men, in political and business affairs, since this means that the men are decadent and the women are no longer women. This is not a sermon on the role or position of women; it is a statement of bald and basic fact.”
These have been criticised by Alan Scherstuhl of The Village Voice as expressions of hatred towards women. However, Baylor University professor Dr. J. Gordon Melton has written that Hubbard disregarded and abrogated much of his earlier views about women, which Melton views as merely echos of common prejudices at the time. Melton has also stated that the Church of Scientology welcomes both genders equally at all levels from leadership positions to auditing and so on since Scientologists view people as spiritual beings.
Whether misogynist views are implanted along with Scientology indoctrination is an interesting question. It would seem they are – at least on some level – for those who take the fundamentalist position that Ron is ‘Source’, and it is illegal and punishable to state or infer or consider that anything he uttered or wrote is ‘background’, ‘no longer in use’, or ‘historical’.
Regardless, there is little question that the church of Scientology and its 30-year-tenured supreme leader David Miscavige are so misogynist in practice as to qualify as anachronistic, if not outside of the law and boundaries of common societal mores on the subject of the sexes. We will shed more light on that subject in the near future.
