It was a little un-nerving for your columnist, who, after all, has lived in this town for at 80 years, to find himself being treated with suspicion by a local shop-keeper. Asked to pick up an item from a local shop for a friend in another town, your scribe was first of all asked for 'identification' (a driver's licence was produced) and finally came away without the item in question. Our friend will have to pick it up herself. We don't have any axe murders to our credit (so far), so don't appreciate being treated like a criminal.
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We see where the Prime Minister has refused to fund qualified youth workers in schools, in preference to 'chaplains.' This means that our children are to be counselled, not by people with an appropriate background in work of this nature, but by people with a commitment to a particular brand of religion, some of which probably have a rather slippery grasp of reality. For instance, how is a 'chaplain' going to counsel a young person who might be unsure of his or her sexuality when the church community that the chaplain represents considers that people of alternative gender are 'seriously disordered?' We think a lot of parents, and ordinary community members, will object to this 'enforcing' of religion on our schools.
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Then there is the story of the young chap who asked his father, a church minister, if he could borrow the family car. The father said that if he read the Bible, attended to his studies and had his long hair cut, he would consider it. A month later the father agreed that the lad had been reading the good book regularly and his school grades were acceptable. "But you haven't had your hair cut," he said. The boy had an excuse. "What about all those people in the Bible," he replied, "Like Moses, Jonah, Noah, and even Jesus. They had long hair," he said. "Yes," The father responded, "And they all walked everywhere!"