A brand of Italian ice-cream is using extremely sexually suggestive ads of models dressed as priests and nuns to promote itself. Needless to say, there have been objections. Those objecting have already been decried as 'bigots'.

The firm's creative director declared: "Only a tiny proportion of those who have seen the ads have made complaints. They seem to be upholding the views of a bigoted minority over the majority."

This is how secularists respond to all criticism, namely with the ready-made and intellectually lazy accusation of bigotry.

But the accusation can in fact be turned the other way because who but someone who has total disrespect for religion, or at least for the Catholic Church, would have produced these ads in the first place?