No blog with pretensions to finger/pulse proximity can afford to let the Suzanne Moore / Julie Burchill furore go by without comment. Particularly when it has in the past railed against the iniquities of legislation restricting the right to offend.
In a Guardian article, Suzanne Moore used the image of a Brazilian transsexual as a simile. She was then smothered in hostile comment in the Twittersphere. Julie Burchill wrote an article in the Observer supporting Moore, an article so rancid in its tone that even I found it quite offensive; if I had actually been a transsexual, Brazilian or otherwise, I would have been pretty cross.
But that's tough isn't it? There is no right not to be offended. Even if there were, what's more important - the transgendered's freedom from abuse, or the right to free speech? I know which I would value most.
The tide of stupidity does at last seem to be turning on this. The government is going to remove the word "insulting" from s.5 of the Public Order Act. OK, this is only where a potential victim cannot be identified, but it's a start. The other day I read Roy Greenslade, ex Mirror editor and now journalism professor, saying that being offensive should only attract criminal sanction where to do so might incite violence. That seems fair enough, and it was where the law stood for a century until politicians started fiddling with it recently.
The equivalent section in the Malicious Communications Act could go too, since it has led to such triumphs of cretinousness as the prosecution of a boy who posted a photo of a burning poppy on the net with the caption "take that you squadey (sic) c$%*s", or similar.
So how did the Observer react to the hoo-ha? It was obviously too late to recall the print edition, so it removed Burchill's piece from its website instead.
I find it hard to overstate how contemptible this is. And not just because a newspaper that purports to be liberal should not be in the business of suppressing free comment.
Burchill has been hired by editors of British newspapers for thirty years because she opens a bottle of wine when she begins writing her column and finishes both wine and column at the same time. No-one knows, least of all Burchill, what's going to come out during the intervening hour or so. Only that it will be sparklingly well written.
Who could possibly imagine that someone hired as a controversialist would, well, write something controversial? Well apparently it surprised the Observer's editor. He or she should grow up fast.
As a final rancid cherry on top of this teetering pile of dung, in steps the Liberal Democrat MP Lynne Featherstone, calling for Burchill to be sacked. Yes, that's an elected politician in a democracy calling for a journalist to lose her job for writing something she didn't like.
I hope I remember this next time I consider voting Lib Dem.
Throughout this saga support for Burchill has come, surprisingly, from the Torygraph, which first republished the offending article and now prints a sympathetic piece by Allison Pearson. "This is a free country", she writes, "and the price we pay for that freedom is letting silly insults or harmless asides roll off us". When the Torygraph can effortlessly occupy the moral high ground on freedom of speech, the liberal press needs to look to its laurels.
