Residents of an Ohio community are begging a church and strip club to call off rival weekly protests which have included a topless picket.
The New Beginnings church in the town of Warsaw has been engaged in an eight-year feud with the Foxhole, a strip club in nearby New Castle.
The row began after members of the congregation began protesting outside the club on Friday nights, recording car number plates of patrons and asking if their wives and mothers knew where they were.
The strippers retaliated by holding their own demonstration outside Sunday services, wearing bikinis or going bare-breasted as they displayed signs saying, “He who casts the first stone”.
The rival protests are now a weekly event, to the despair of residents in the towns. Last week, letters signed by the local law director, sheriff and prosecutor were sent to Pastor Bill Dunfee, of the New Beginnings ministry, and Thomas George, owner of the club, saying that the row was giving the area a negative image, and stretching the resources of police.
Bob Skelton, the County Law Director, said: “We’re just worried about violence breaking out.”
George said he would call off his employees’ protest if the church stopped bothering his customers. But Pastor Dunfee said he would only do so if the “lost souls” from the club would turn to Christianity.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
