Gordon John Manché loves the limelight. His Christian evangelical group River of Love has hundreds of followers, many clearly enchanted by his stage antics.

He appears to be on a particularly disturbing crusade to stop homosexuality. It does not end there.

During the COVID pandemic, he claimed restrictions against the unvaccinated are part of a global conspiracy that is a prelude to “the mark of the beast”.

And then it got darker. In January 2022, the police questioned members of his movement to understand a murder suspect’s links to River of Love. The accused attended a River of Love ceremony the night before he allegedly raped and killed Paulina Dembska.

Last December, Manché filed a judicial protest against Times of Malta, demanding that articles linking his evangelical community to the murder are taken down from the website. We rejected the request and filed a counter-protest against him.

Manché’s outrageous statements have become online memes and gone viral. He has become the butt of jokes. He also has a very thin skin.

And this is why he keeps going to the police to report artists and satirists when they joke about him or his River of Love.

Last January, criminal charges were filed against Matthew Bonanno, who runs the satirical site Bis-Serjetà, because he joked that River of Love should be ‘carpet bombed’ along with Buġibba.

Last week, we learnt that comedian Daniel Xuereb is to be taken to court for “making insults and threats” after he joked that Manché is “Malta’s biggest asshole”.

Just days later, he went after Sean Buhagiar, the artistic director of Teatru Malta, after he repeated Bonanno and Xuereb’s quips.

All this suggests Manché is bent on transferring his own insecurities onto his critics. That is certainly not a crime and the pastor is well within his rights to file complaints to the police, as ludicrous as they might be.

The bemusing takes a more sinister turn, however, when law enforcement takes such asinine complaints seriously and drags people into court.

There must at least be some sort of filter by which basic case law is reviewed before someone like Bonanno, Xuereb and Buhagiar and, possibly, others are charged for insignificant comments posted on Facebook.

The police are clearly not investigating the gravity of the ‘insult’ and are dumping any reported case lock, stock and barrel into the in-tray of the overloaded courts.

In other words, they are taking the easy way out. If they are trying to notch up the statistics of fighting online harassment, they are impressing nobody.

Taxpayer money and precious court time are being wasted on cases the prosecution has almost no chance of winning – and which have a chilling effect on public discourse.

It is therefore no surprise that so many people are criticising the police for giving Manché the time of day. Court time cannot be occupied by people who feel offended. If Manché felt hurt by a satirist, he could have used his own pulpit to make his point, or filed a civil suit for libel. 

Let us not forget this is the same police force that continues to ignore countless criminal complaints backed by reams of documents, reports or eyewitness accounts. In some cases, police have even failed to prosecute people despite being instructed to do so by a magistrate.

That same force has now decided that Sean Buhagiar, Matt Bonanno and Daniel Xuereb are a threat to society, and in so doing, invited ridicule on itself.

Thankfully, Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri and Culture Minister Owen Bonnici were both quick to slam Manche’s complaints. It is now up to them and the police commissioner to make sure precious police time is not wasted on these charades.