How To Win Government Friends And Screw Up Kids

A Department of Education press release today allows me to finally join the dots between various evangelical chancers with Manx government influence.
The press release puffs up 'The Story So Far' - Christian theatrics from The Lacey Theatre of Cardiff forced on any schoolchild who couldn't forge a sick note fast enough at the new Studio Theatre, Ballakermeen School.
Apparently it meets the National Curriculum requirements for understanding Christianity. So would studying the Holocaust with a professional history teacher.
The island owes this feast of fatuity to Bill Platt, self-styled 'youth worker' at Broadway Baptists, who apparently knew the late Robert Lacey, founder of the company.
Curious to know how much public money gets thrown at this kind of scam, I looked the Lacey Theatre up on the England & Wales Charity Register.
Suprise, suprise, one of their trustees - Norman Adams - is also a trustee of Care for the Family, whose Manx worker is involved in 'drug counselling' for the Manx Education Department and also the Chief Minister's Drug & Alcohol Strategy. This though the organisation has no formal charitable status on the island.
Having seen both CftF and Stauros (another evangelical 'drug project' operating on the island) in action I would say that their combined professional knowledge could safely fit on the back of a postage stamp and still leave room for BULLSHIT in block capitals. Yet under the latest proposals, such loons may be compulsorily foisted on not just kids but families who upset the temperance nazis. Be warned; three units and you meet your worst nightmare -a social worker with a bible!
And it gets uglier.
When Care for the Family started over here, it was via links with their Scottish and Northern Irish operations. Such sanctimonious timewasting attracts those 'charitable initiatives' whereby companies with a lousy reputation throw money at 'community projects' - often evangelical groups - in a cheap, tax-deductible attempt to look like they care. Their English and Welsh operations were even less clear, though on the face of it they were sad clowns, not serious bigots. Then the charity register threw up another suprise. One of CftF's other trustees, John O'Brien, is also a trustee of CARE ('Christian Action Research & Education'), notorious for favouring Section 28, opposing civil partnerships, counselling registrars how to plead 'conscience grounds' for not registering civil partnerships, and generally inflicting christofascist crap on anyone with the temerity to read books.
It is little known locally that the daughter of the last Manx education minister got a Westminster internship with CARE just after graduating, and Care for the Family's links with the Manx education system curiously enough began at about that time.
My attitude to an Education Department which invites dim 'religious charity workers' into Manx classrooms without background checks, allows knuckledraggingly cretinous Baptist cults to use some school premises for Sunday worship, but still finds it impractical for my child to sit out acts of prayer in one of the island's biggest, best-equipped infant schools has always been .................. somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Knowing freaks like some of those mentioned above can not only be in the same room as my child, but get public money to try and make her as dumb as them, could make things far worse if I took them seriously.
Thankfully I will never have to, and make it quite clear that neither does she.