I want Coulter's Law introduced to lock up keyboard cranks using social networks to attack journalists and their families.
Lord Justice Leveson put forward a series of suggestions to regulate us reporters, which if Tory Prime Minister Dandy Dave Cameron puts them in place will mean the end of a free press as we know it.
But what is sauce for the journalist goose must be sauce for the social network gander.
And I especially despise the assholes who waken up one morning, start blogging, social networking on Facebook, and tweeting and dare to call themselves 'citizen journalists'!
Many of them have never attended formal journalist training. We professional journalists are having more and more rules imposed on us, yet these social network slabbers can attack us at will.
At least we journalists are required to think before we write; many bloggers, tweeters and Facebook freaks write before they think.
If I published some of the comments written about me and my family for which I have print-outs, I would either spend the rest of my life paying off libel damages, or I'd be in jail with the judge ordering the cell key to be thrown away.
If the result of the Leveson inquiry is to place new millstones around our necks, then the same laws must be applied to keyboard cranks. I want them jailed as an example – and warning – to all.
We urgently need an inquiry into how social networking is policed. Here's a selection from those print-outs of what has been penned about me as a working journalist during last year alone.
A leading loyalist carried this warning on Facebook: "You have a republican mole on your friends list. His name is John Coulter and he works for the Irish Daily Star. Warn anyone who is a mutual friend of his on FB."
As a Christian, I fully support Creation – the fact that God created the world in six days, and the brave decision this year of the National Trust to include Creation as part of its visitors' display centre at the world famous Giant's Causeway in Co Antrim.
This was not a tub-thumping rant and here are some of the more violent reactions I got. So much for the concept of free speech.
"But are we not all sick to death of the f**king religious freaks on this planet. I for one can only take so much of the idiotic fairy tales and bronze age mythology without wanting to run up and punch one of them square in the forehead. I have fantasies that imposing that velocity of a knock to the brain might knock some sense in the f**kers."
"Bring back the Colluseum (sic). There are many starving lions in Africa. Please donate a Christian today."
"This man speaks and raises awareness of a debate in our society. Not Creation, abortion. Is it too late to abort him now?"
"Silly backward John. May try being born again, this time by reading a book or two that isn't the Bible."
"You're a deluded cretin."
It is now time we journalists declared war through the courts on people who use social networking to threaten us and our families. But there is a real difference between expressing a critical opinion on what we write and issuing threats against us and our families.
Give us journalists the legal muscle, and let battle commence in 2013!
