More biblebashers going bad

What is it about godbothering pensioners and their attitude to the law?
Back in December I highlighted the case of an old cow who cut up rough when traffic police stopped her racing to church (see When biblebashers go bad on 17th December).
Now there’s an even funnier case – though potentially more serious. Again not on line, possibly again to spare the pious fossil’s blushes, so here’s a quick precis:
85 year old dear overdoes the wine at Sunday lunch, then decides she just must drive to church. Police are alerted to a car being driven erratically through Port Erin, and arrive to find said car has mounted the pavement by the local RC church and hit the wall. The visibly disorientated driver has to be taken 20 odd miles to Douglas (being a Sunday all other police stations are shut) and when eventually tested is way over the drink-driving limit.
In court her brief tries everything, from rounding up the congregation as character references to accusing the police of being less than Cary Grant with the geriatric gin-guzzler. The judge is also told she’s indispensable at church, where she launders the fancy dress costumes.
Does make you wonder, doesn’t it?
Fellow godbotherers who’ll act as character references, and priests with all expenses paid cars being waited on hand and foot. Obviously not that ‘indispensable’ if none of them could offer her a lift. With a £400 fine and 12 month driving ban, let’s see if they pitch in now she really has problems.
The funny thing is, the police are proudly saying how the Christmas drink driving figures are down thanks to their prominent campaigning (see http://www.gov.im/lib/news/dha/police/highvisibilitypo.xml). Every teenager and single parent from a sink estate who’s been random checked in recent months should now say ‘get off my back and stop a few biblebashers instead before they kill someone’.
Sadly, while death in the shape of godbothering grannies is now kept off the roads, the other subject area of my December posting isn’t improving.
For example, a Chelsea tractor parked on the pavement outside a Douglas religious establishment twice daily on Sundays which necessitates anyone (e.g. mums with prams or the disabled) having to step into the centre of a busy narrow road to pass. One pensioner was about to report it, only for a young mum to tell him not to bother.
Seems she’d almost been ploughed down a few times by the same vehicle in the prison car park while visiting, and finally reported it through the advised official channels – i.e. the senior prison officer then doubling up as acting prison governor.
Guess who the reckless driver was?
Knowing how admired he is in senior police circles – especially amongst fellow members of Christian police groups – what are the chances he will be told to park his car legally this side of an ‘unavoidable’ fatal traffic accident?

It's not pastoring, it's mugging

A report in a Wandsworth newspaper (see http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/wandsworthnews/3799067.Debate_over_Street_Pastors/ flagged up on the NSS site gives a taste of what could be coming here, if we don't stop it.
The Wandsworth council are paying evangelicals from the Ascension Trust £10K a year, topped up with another £5K from the police, to act as 'street pastors'. Locals are not impressed and want the money spent on proper community facilities instead.
It's not even as if they have relevant local experience - the cult started in Ghana and most of their trustees are from there. They're also so slow at filing their accounts and annual returns as a registered charity that in 2005 they were almost struck off the register. These days they're almost on time - though with an £800K income and a large chunk not spent there are still questions to be asked.
There have been some sly attempts at street pastoring over here too. Some Douglas ones were stopped dead in their tracks a few months back by a letter in the Examiner suggesting the police arrest them for aggressive begging. After all, if chasing folk with small kids and pensioners down the Prom threatening them with hellfire and eternal damnation isn't demanding money with menaces, what is?
But our Southern Baptists now even have their own bus, as well as a 'youth pastor' who pesters teenage kids in a secondary school to the point of apparently being supplied with their mobile numbers by a staff member (see previous postings for more). It beggars belief that, while our legitimate youth services have to badger small businesses for cash and materials because the education Department won't fund them, superstitious halfwits with the combined intellect of plankton can get something close to a six figure sum for the same pastor to drive around harassing kids, and even police back-up when they tell him to clear off.
Douglas Baptists and their ridiculous 'Machine' project also had a go a few years back - at least until strong local pressure closed down a 'community resource' apparently getting public funds on the basis of calling any kid who sat at a popular meeting point outside a member. Oh, and however hard they tried to dissuade the families of witnesses, that pastor getting nailed for underage sex on the premises didn't help.
Neither did using a speaker with a background in Loyalist paramilitarism, I suspect. 'Street smart' that wasn't, but also a shame the Manx police somehow forgot to check his background; they might have picked up on an appeal from Coleraine police about a mysterious fire in a family planning clinic and asked him more pertinent questions than the ones his local mates fed him at his 'drug seminar'.
There seems to be a ridiculously simple answer. If you really want to stop street crime in the Isle of Man, make sure our biblebashers stay home at nights.