It appears that Front Sight is suing Diana Mertz Hsieh.

Why? At this point we don’t know, but the characterization of this as an attack on free speech by Scientology is getting a lot of play.

In reading Hsieh’s site it seems clear that Hsieh is more than a bit of a crusader against Scientology and that she’s been harassing Front Sight founder Ignatius Piazza about possible personal ties to Scientology. Quite apparently she wants him to publicly repudiate Scientology, and she tosses around thinly veiled threats of turning his customers against him.

Piazza says he’s a Catholic. He says there is no connection between Scientology and Front Sight. Even Hsieh agrees on that point. I think people would be looking at this a lot differently if Hsieh were badgering Piazza to publicly repudiate Catholicism because of crimes real and imagined that the church has participated in. Can a decent person be a Catholic in good faith without sanctioning everything his church has ever done? I think so. I don’t see why a Scientologist can’t do the same. And we don’t even know that Piazza is currently a Scientologist, though it seems clear he has been connected.

Hsieh started down this road by following up on inflammatory reports about Front Sight, reports which she now concludes were “libelous in their wild speculations and claims”. I see no good evidence that Piazza or Front Sight have done anything wrong at all, for all I know the suit may be an attempt to get her remove some of that libelous material from her site; she quotes the libelous material. Front Sight’s right to such relief may be highly arguable, but I wouldn’t be terribly alarmed that they would argue for it if the law permits.

But this is more speculation; we don’t know what the suit is about. I’ll tell you this though, I don’t see anything particularly noble or attractive in Hsieh’s harassment of Piazza and Front Sight.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 9th, 2002 at Nov 09, 02 | 12:25 pm and is filed under The Usual Suspects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.