I’m not going to explain the title – there’s the comment section for people who want to show off – and I’m using it as an eye-grabber for some thoughts about carnival, so I’m not even sure it’s contextually correct.

I was at the Nadur Carnival on the Saturday and it was fun. Sporadically weird, generally crowded and sometimes head-shakingly peculiar, it certainly wasn’t the threat to general good order and public peace that so many people seem to think it is.

True, the law, ass that it is, still prohibits the donning of costumes that represent clerical ladies and gentlemen (though I’m not sure whether this is restricted to Christian versions of such folk) or that represent the uniforms of the military or coppers. The law is hard, but it remains the law, though there is much to be said for the enforcers of the law taking a leaf out of Nelson’s book.

Again true, believers (of any stripe) don’t like to see their beliefs made fun of or lampooned and the leaders of the belief system concerned have the right to have a bit of a moan when this happens – freedom of expression cuts both ways, after all.

So far be it from me to gainsay the Bishops in their protests about fun being made of their religion – not that I noticed such fun being made, I have to point out. The mickey was being extracted from Islam, to a very slight degree, but I didn’t spot anyone being less than respectful of Jesus and the Apostles. This is not to say that it didn’t happen, just that I didn’t see it.

But protesting and generally having a moan is one thing, while encouraging the authorities to clamp down and come over all fundamentalist is quite another. Leaving aside the damage done to their own cause by the po-faced stance taken by the Bishops (I don’t suppose it would be realistic to expect that they should have a jolly good laugh about the whole thing) and leaving aside as well the thought that, just maybe, Jesus had a bit of a sense of humour and a bit of a belief in His convictions to the extent that people being rude about it aren’t going to threaten the Faith, is any good going to be done by prosecuting people?

After all, many of the comments made demonstrate that “we the people” are getting a tiny bit fed up of other people taking it upon themselves that they can tell us what to think or do when faced with representations of opinion and expression. It’s clear in my mind that the Friggieri woman should have led her Cinema and Theatre Classification Board to do its job, that is to say to classify and not ban. It’s equally clear to me that the Bishops – while being perfectly free to make their opinion known – should not have invited people to make pretty unfortunate references to the priorities that seem to concern the authorities, be they Church or State.

Frankly, certain people in authority seem to have become much too eager to clamp down and react when people speak their mind. We’re not, by any stretch of the imagination, back in the bad old days when to dare to criticise the Church earned you a visit from the Inquisition (those were really the bad old days) or, not as long ago, when to dare to criticise the Government was equated with high treason and earned you a visit from, at best, the boys in dirty brown.

But – perhaps with the benefit of a couple of weeks of holiday, when no-one except a traffic cop tells you what to do – there seem to be too many people ready to jump down your throat and fire you or berate you or prosecute you or stop you going to the theatre or call you a Philistine nowadays. Tolerance and forbearance, anyone? Yeah, right.

Getting back to the Nadur Carnival, though, many of those who weren’t mildly annoyed by the way the cops decided to prosecute after the Bishops made a noise justified this incursion on liberalism by making the point that if it had been Islam that had been insulted, all hell would have been let loose and the dogs of war slipped.

Balderdash, not to put too fine a point on it.

Just because loony Islamic Fundamentalists think they can scream and shout and declare Fatwe (is that the plural of Fatwa?) if someone dares to joke about their religion, this doesn’t mean that when the same thing is done in the name of Christianity, that’s all right then.

And before anyone draws himself up to his full height and says that what the Bishops did was not loony Christian Fundamentalism, let me hasten to point out that it was not I that made the comparison, but the people who justified their protests by invoking Islamic threats following those cartoons.

More than ever, I am tending towards the idea that it should be made law that telling me what to say and how to say it and what to think and how to think it should attract severe punishment.