Blasphemers, whether restrained or hardened, whether spontaneous or affected, we are now reaching the point in which the authorities will recognize your full right to the use of a practice that from time immemorial, has united the people of the Western world in a chorus that is never silenced.

   Blasphemy-which, as history teaches, was born with the advent of religion-is the precise outline of divine scriptures elaborated by the popular imagination. Power has always considered the blasphemer as a hostile figure, always obstructing her, at times in a bloody manner. When religious dogma represented the central element of the dominant culture and politics, the executioners' swords were made ready to quiet the foul language that arose from the masses, in order to prevent it from passing beyond the insult of the sacred symbols of power to its direct physical destruction.

   Blaspheming god and his worthy cronies is a practice that can attain, in its most noble and, hence, courageous statement, the meaning of revolt. I am not referring to the customary blasphemy slipped absent-mindedly into the verbal refrains of so many, but to the vigorous, lively and aware profanation of the baby Jesus, his parents and associates, his beautiful little chapels and his groveling black-robed servants.

   In a recent judgment, an Italian judge established that blaspheming god is a crime, while from now on the virgin can be made into a laughing-stock with the most colorful expressions in full legality. A decision that is the fruit of an accurate theological distinction, but that raises an important question: will removing the prohibition against such blasphemy kill it, undermining its most intimate meaning by eliminating the very savor of transgression? Could it even reach the point of sharing in the pathetic end of its bitter enemy and fellow traveler-religion-which has already become a shrine for tourists, having transferred its sacred nature into the more modern abstraction, humanity? But no, I see that there are still many despicable sacred canopies to be desecrated; it is probably just a question of seeking out new subjects to which to willingly devote oneself.

   Without any restraint of course. There is nothing sadder than an insult drenched in the shadow of remorse.