…for chrissake, stop digging.

This is unseemly. It’s undignified. Lame and pathetic.

I left feeling it had been a tough evening, but maybe something had been accomplished by way of establishing human contact. I didn’t realize there was more to it, that I had walked into a trap….I forged ahead here, unaware that this was a trap, not a bona fide question — a dumb mistake for someone of my age and experience.

A trap, Tom? If so, as many have pointed out already, it’s one you baited more than three years ago. You were asked a question in a public venue. You responded. Own your response. Man up.

Worse: not once in your column did you cite the most offensive phrase in your comments: that viewers of child porn don’t “harm another person.” Admittedly, you do seem to refer obliquely to it:

One of the main arguments in favour of the current law is that the industry of child pornography is a response to consumer demand. Stamp out the demand by penalizing the consumer, and the supply will dry up because production and sale will no longer be profitable. The argument seems logical, but it doesn’t have a great track record. Child porn seems to be a bigger problem now than when the law was passed 20 years ago.

A classic non sequitur, built upon a shaky foundation of speculation, but perhaps you weren’t in “professorial mode” when you wrote this. “Seems to be a bigger problem now”? Even if it were actually the case, rather than merely “seeming” to be, why is attacking the consumer end of the problem wrong in itself?

Are you making a sly anti-Prohibition argument? Suggesting that possession of child porn should be decriminalized because the market is supposedly unaffected by force of law? That we shouldn’t try to “impose morality,” even though we aren’t talking cultivation of poppies, coca and hemp here, or running stills in the woods, but the torture and rape of children?

No, don’t answer that. You’re almost in China as it is.