Looks like the Pastafarians have been affected Washington: Mienke de Wilde doesn't leave home without a colander on her head. She wears it to class like a hat. It covers the top of her hair in the supermarket.
If you were looking for her in the crowd at a recent Guns N' Roses concert, she was the one wearing a pasta strainer with pride. She even wore it on a visit to the Vatican.
So it shouldn't be all that surprising that she also expects to be able to wear it in her licence and passport pictures.
Marcus Bowring managed to get his Vicroads licence taken with a pasta strainer on his head in 2016.
Photo: Jason South
In 2016, Australian Marcus Bowring was issued a driver's licence after he had his photo taken while dressed in the customary headgear at the Carlton VicRoads office in Melbourne. The 34-year-old said he had expected a steamy reception when he prepared to face the camera after a fellow Pastafarian initially had a similar request knocked back in 2015.
De Wilde, 32, is a Dutch law student who subscribes to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Pastafarianism. But this week, the Netherlands' Council of State determined that her belief system doesn't count as religion and thus rejected her request to keep the pasta strainer on her head in her government ID photos.
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"At first of course I thought just like everybody else: Who are these jokers?" she said. But now she thinks "people fear what they don't know".
And to be fair, many people don't know about Pastafarianism. The group's website says it "came into the mainstream" in 2005, when Bobby Henderson, an American, wrote an open letter to the Kansas school board, claiming that if creationism could be taught in schools, then Flying Spaghetti Monsterism should be, too.
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And in some places, her demand to be respected for wearing a colander on her head might not be considered so outrageous. In New Zealand, Pastafarians can legally conduct marriages. In Russia, at least one man has successfully posed for his licence photo while wearing a pasta strainer. There's even a documentary film being made about the group.
But the Dutch Council of State said that religions must have "seriousness and coherence" and that Pastafarianism has neither. "It may be the case that the colander is considered a holy object for Pastafarians, worn in honour of the Flying Spaghetti Monster but there is no obligation to do so," the ruling said, according to The Guardian.
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So pastafarians are not 'serious and coherent'..??
