It's impossible to muster any emotion beyond gape-mouthed revulsion at Barbara Amiel's latest Maclean's column, a seething, meandering rant against anyone who dares affect "prune-faced horror" at innocent partakers of "a few minor vices." The minor vices in question, incidentally, are sexual harassment, rape, and child porn. Herein lies the central irony of Amiel's essay: it's an appallingly immoral call for morality, an anti-elitist argument that reads like an offering from Monty Python's Upper-Class Twit of the Year competition.

You'd have thought Maclean's would have blazoned the death of Section 13 all over its front cover. With a massive headline along the lines of "SCREW YOU, CENSORS!!!" Or "WE WON!!!" Instead, the cover featured a generic picture of an innocuous youngish woman and an innocuous youngish man grinning maniacally and the silly headline: "The majority of us are singles. So why do we still live in a couples world?"