TVSquad

I knew the Church of Scientology had a lot of reach in Hollywood to enlist big names like Tom Cruise, Edgar Winter and the guy from Taxi who keeps popping up on celebrity weight loss and rehab shows.

But now they have either grown too powerful or have completely lost whatever grip they had left on reality, which wasn't a whole hell of a lot to begin with. They have recruited a cartoon character.

Bart Simpson's voice appeared in a phone recording advertising a Scientologist gathering in Hollywood that was clearly voiced by Nancy Cartwright. Of course, the audio found its way to the Internet. 20th Century Fox has been scrambling to pull it off every corner of YouTube ever since Perez Hilton broke the story and Fox made him remove it. You can hear it here before Fox spoils the fun for the rest of us.

Biting the hand that feeds you is a popular sport in Hollywoodland. We all know that Scientologist Isaac Hayes, the voice of South Park's Chef, parted ways with the show after its Emmy-nominated, Scientology-mocking "Trapped in the Closet" episode aired last year. Hayes was reported as saying that the show had crossed from "satire" to "intolerance," which is apparently what happens when your own belief system is mocked instead of someone else's. Following the controversy, Chef was served an unholy and definitive end in which he was burned, beaten, impaled, shot and quartered by a grizzly bear and a mountain lion. Oh, and he defecated as he expired.

Given this series of cartoon events, why the New York Post would bother to ask Hayes whether or not he planned on returning to the show is beyond me, but Hayes' answer was clear.