THE Church of England is often portrayed as the cuddliest of the sects, all jolly hymns and cake sales rather than fire and brimstone.

But – like the 2,000 Muslims who wasted a perfectly good Saturday afternoon protesting against a film they hadn’t watched – Anglicans are not averse to losing all perspective when they feel their beliefs are under attack.

So it was on Monday when former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey (inset) likened supporters of gay marriage to Hitler.

When asked about Nick Clegg describing opponents of same-sex unions as “bigots”, the former top Anglican replied: “Let us remember the Jews of Nazi Germany. What started against them was when they started to be called names. And that was the first stage towards the totalitarian state.”

As Andrew Mitchell might tell you, this tactic is known by the corrupted Latin phrase reductio ad Hitlerum – reduce to Hitler.

When someone says something you don’t like, don’t bother using logic, reason or insight to refute their point – just call them a Nazi.

Mr Carey’s use of reductio ad Hitlerum becomes even more ludicrous when you recall that Mr Clegg didn’t really call anti-gay marriage types “bigots” in the first place.

A few weeks ago his office put out a statement dropping the B-bomb and then the Deputy Prime Minister, showing the backbone for which he is famous, withdrew the remark.

So perhaps Mr Carey should have gone even further. The Jews of Germany should have realised they were in trouble, not when their Gentile neighbours started calling them names, but when they thought about calling them names and then quickly changed their minds.

I’m curious about how the archbishop came to associate gay marriage with totalitarianism.

Unless I’ve seriously misunderstood the Government’s proposals, the idea is that we will all be free to marry someone of the same gender if we wish – a right which the vast majority of us will choose not to exercise.

To listen to Mr Carey, you’d think we were all about to be marched off to concentration camps and assigned a random partner of the same gender.

Or is that just me being bigoted against people who make stupid comparisons to conceal the fact that their arguments have no rational basis?