A candidate for one of the top jobs at the new Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario told a government committee yesterday he thinks print journalism should be subject to racial discrimination complaints.

Alan Whyte, a veteran employer-side labour lawyer, told an all-party panel vetting the two dozen government nominees that he supports the media's broad freedom to report stories "as they see fit."

This is a column condemning cowardice – including my own. It begins with the story of a novel you cannot read. The Jewel of Medina was written by a journalist called Sherry Jones. It recounts the life of Aisha, a girl who was married off at the age of six to a 50-year-old man called Mohamed ibn Abdallah. On her wedding day, Aisha was playing on a see-saw outside her home. Inside, she was being betrothed. The first she knew of it was when she was banned from playing out in the street with the other children. When she was nine, she was taken to live with her husband, now 53. He had sex with her. When she was 14, she was accused of adultery with a man closer to her own age. Not long after, Mohamed decreed ...

...But as long as we seem to keep discussing and debating pornography, here's a provocative suggestion that could impact the parameters of those discussions and debates: is there a positive upside to the proliferation of pornography?

Not positive in the sense of providing more job opportunities to those who get their kicks having sex in front of lights and cameras, but positive to society in general.

Consider that the amount of pornography has exploded with the onset of the Internet age, and sexual assaults in Canada have plunged dramatically over the last 15 years.

According to Statistics Canada, the number of sexual assaults declined by 32.6 per cent between 1994 and 2004. That drop hasn't ended, either; 2006 ...