My husband and I publish an on-line social justice magazine. We are a bi-racial couple (he's White - I'm Black) and have posted a picture of ourselves in the "About Us" section of our site since its inception. The site gets about 450,000 pageviews a month. As online publishing goes, that's not a huge number but it's enough traffic that we'd be naïve not to expect to receive nasty comments from time to time from the lesser evolved souls that live among us.

Of course, we have a comments policy but I'm not sure anyone reads it and we have a spam filter. Our main final line of defense in the battle to prevent caustic comments from offending our readers is that we both check the comments that come to our site every day.

Yesterday, Dick took me on a date. We went to dinner and a movie – something we don't do often enough. After being away from our computers for several hours, we returned to the office we share. Dick checked the comments that had been posted while we were out and began to mumble.