Margarita and the Scientologists

It's worth adding one footnote to today's Post story on the tight relationship between Margarita Lopez and groups affiliated with the Church of Scientology. (Short version: She steers city funds into their, er, unconventional health programs; they give her campaign money.)

Margarita is a proudly out lesbian, but Scientology has a rather, well, complicated relationship with homosexuality, detailed in this Wikipedia entry. The bottom line is that they appear to see it as a curable condition, though the group seems to be getting more pro-gay.

The church's late founder, L. Ron Hubbard, had this to say:

"The sexual pervert (and by this term Dianetics, to be brief, includes any and all forms of deviation in dynamic two such as homosexuality, lesbianism, sexual sadism, etc., and all down the catalog of Ellis and Krafft-Ebing) is actually quite ill physically."