A new opium for the peopleROBIN DOUGLAS apologises for not putting on his shirt while giving a sermon to a parishioner via Skype. His listener doesn’t mind; she doesn’t feel well enough to drive the hour from her home to the Church of the Holy Smoke in White Rock, a seaside town near Canada’s border with the United States. So she gets his rambling advice via a laptop.
Even in the Vancouver area, mocked by Canadians from elsewhere as a nest of decadence, Pastor Douglas, as he calls himself, leaves nobody indifferent. His parish office is a wooden house with hand-written signs at the front and old pizza boxes inside. His central place of “worship” is a tatty tent; the main liturgical practice is smoking marijuana.
The rich folk who share the beach-front rejoiced in midsummer when the council told him to fold the tent and put an end to the smoke, garbage and noise. He is unrepentant. “We are a church,” he insists. “We do good works, we help cancer patients with free marijuana. I could be a millionaire if I sold it.”
How strong is his legal case? Canadian courts, like American ones, have been asked...
from The Economist: The Americas http://ift.tt/1NcFwyv
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