THE cyber bullies who piled onto anti-porn activist Melinda Tankard Reist last week are behaving like 17th century witch hunters, not the enlightened tolerance queens they claim to be.
Tankard Reist’s crime was to be profiled not unfavourably in a magazine which described her as “one of Australia’s best-known feminist voices”.

This infuriated the miserable Orcs who lurk in the dark recesses of twitter and the blogosphere.

Up they sprang to pour calumny on Tankard Reist, a pro-life feminist and 48-year-old mother of four.

She was nothing but a “fundamentalist Christian” trying to hide her religious beliefs. Therefore, her views on the sexualisation of children, the objectification of women, the corrosive effect of internet pornography, were suspect.

Oh, and she should be anally raped with a coffee cup, according to one twitter critic.

“This is the price I pay for getting a fair and decent run,” she said ruefully last week from her Canberra home, after being “driven offline” by the vitriol and forced to seek legal advice.

“If someone has a faith, even a struggling inadequate faith like mine, you are run out of the public square.”

Tankard Reist is “of the religious right and a member of a church that preaches the second coming of Christ, the end time, and evangelism”, declared her nemesis, obscure North Coast blogger Jennifer Wilson, who describes herself as a psychotherapist.