They Canceled Our Ceremony Just Before the Wedding

My name is Hannah. I come from Munich, but I’ve been living in Stuttgart for many years.

In January 2012, my husband proposed to me. And then we basically started planning the wedding. In Baden-Württemberg there are a lot of palaces and castles, over a thousand in total. And we thought it would be a great idea to have our wedding at a palace. And we did that and chose a palace close to us, south of Stuttgart. We really liked it there. And the boss, the then-boss of the restaurant had confirmed it for us. We signed the contract, placed the order, paid for everything in advance and then the planning continued.

And a few weeks before the wedding, we had our last menu tasting there. And we thought that we’d tell the owner what type of ceremony we would do, namely a Scientology one. And then one morning, I get an email from the secretary of this restaurant that they are going to cancel the reservation for our ceremony. And then I thought, I couldn’t be reading this properly—how do you cancel the reservation two and a half weeks before the wedding, saying that you can’t hold the Scientology ceremony there.

So, at that moment, I was totally shocked. And I thought, we are in 2013, are you really serious that you are making such an issue out of this because of Scientology? And that was a moment I really found to be such a shame because the gentleman who was responsible there was really nice, but the door was completely closed. And he explained to us why that was the case—because this palace doesn’t belong to him. He is the leaseholder and he has a lease contract. And in the lease contract it states that he is not allowed to have anything to do with Scientology, no Scientology events, nothing to do with the teachings of the Founder, L. Ron Hubbard, and nothing that includes the Technology or knowledge of L. Ron Hubbard. This lease contract was written by a bank. I couldn’t find a contact person in the bank, and I also ran out of time, so we decided to do the ceremony somewhere else. So we got off lightly, but this was severe discrimination. I’ve never experienced anything so severe that you “have to” accept such consequences because someone else doesn’t agree with my beliefs.