[via Is baby Suri Cruise living the Scientology life? - Gossip: The Scoop - MSNBC.com [2]]:

"While on his worldwide promotion of Mission Impossible III, I am told, his behavior was, in a word, paranoid," says Ross. "He was obsessed about the purity of the air and at one point, he was convinced he was being followed and insisted on taking longer routes to places. He was also quite concerned about whether locks worked and had them checked. Scientologists are not only afraid of creating engrams, they're also afraid of the effects of those around them who they call Suppressive Persons or SPs. It's possible that Tom Cruise is being overcome by his Scientology training and that's leading to a paranoid world view that is being reflected in his behavior with baby Suri."

I really was not going to write an article about Tom Cruise's bizarro family life but I have to. This privacy and religion thing is cutting too close to the bone for me.

You see, I am living my little invasion of privacy hell because the father of my children has convinced them to try going to school this next September. The privacy that we were afforded with our homeschooling life is gone, dead, kaput and now I have to contend with prying noses of school teachers, principals and administrators in a way that is invasive and crosses the line of being not just rude but anti-constitutional.

An example of this is with my kids vaccination history. With each one of them we had bad experiences after they each got the MMRs. With my oldest it's a miracle he is not autisitic because his health problems point to the kind of immunization meltdown that has caused so many other kids to succumb to autism after being immunized. My son just got lucky.

The state of New York makes it almost impossible to have in any kind of a school setting a child that is not immunized. That is, unless they can prove it goes against their religious reasons.

So if you have a religious exemption, you're good to go. If you can't prove a relgious exemption, your right to choose what is best for your children is completely taken away from you. Not only that, your children have no civil liberties whatsoever in a situation like this. Public Health is one of those gray areas in our system of government in which the rights of individuals are completely by-passed for the 'common good'.

Even if it means that your child will end up mentally disabled for the rest of his life.

So I am curious how the public will respond to Tom Cruise's antics.

This country has always had a love/hate relationship with public displays of religious thought. Christmas is good but a chador [3] or a burqa [3] are bad. The issue with Scientology is worse because it has been considered for decades a cult even though it won it's tax-exemption status as a church back in the 1980s.

What is so fascinating is not so much the church's claims of extraterretialism. What is of debate is what is left unsaid, by the church, based on privacy or in this case, the church's actual theology. Secrecy is at the core of the Church of Scientology, with the higher orders of practices being shrouded in secrecy as a way of not reveling the mystery of their definition of the divine.

So what I am awaiting for is how Cruise's suspect behaviour will affect the discussion around child welfare laws, privacy, parenting and theology in this country. Because, you know it will happen.

This is all about Tom Cruise, Inc vs. Tom Cruise, citizen. It is all about how Tom Cruise,, the Hollywood celebrity enterprise, tries to conflate religious secrecy for the sake of the privacy rights of Tom Cruise, the citizen.

It will be interesting indeed to see how this master of self-promotion will claim privacy rights with the absence of his child's face from major media at a time when Shiloh made her debut days after she was born. I want to know how can Tom Cruise pull-off shielding Suri from the limelight without being deemed a freakazoid or accused of child endangerment when he had no qualms at using his pregnant girlfriend and the timing of his child's birth to hawk his latest movie.

It will be interesting to see the backlash.

Marci Hamilton described in her book God vs. The Gavel [3], how there was a religious movement in this country lobbying to change the laws at the local, state and federal level through a cornucopia of religious exemptions. The Church of Scientology poured millions of dollars in their efforts to push for immunization and public health exemptions based on their theology and over and above civil liberty interpretations of the law.

In effect, freedom of religion was put far above freedom of expression since freedom to choose is part of the penumbra that made abortion laws possible during the 1970s. Freedom to choose became the enemy. It is why dominionists fight so hard to push freedom of religion exemptions all across the country.

The Church of Scientology saw it fit to align themselves with the dominists religious libertarianism. It's the kind of laissez-faire that suits their weird mixture of privacy, religion and celebrity : You can't touch them because it would not be an invasion of privacy or a cooptation of their civil liberties.

You can't touch someone like Tom Cruise because it's an infringement of his religious rights, which is kind of based on a belief that he has the right to be a celebrity as well. So no matter what he does with Suri, he will always be right.

What of the common nobody? What of a former homeschooling progressive-libertarian spiritual atheist nobody?

That's the kind of backlash I am not looking forward to happening to me.

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