Every person walking this Earth has the right to an opinion. This is a sine qua non of democracy, which is the best way to govern that we've figured out so far, and anyone who has lived through any regime that has sought to dictate which opinion is the exclusively acceptable one in society knows what I mean.

And once you have an opinion, you ought to have the right to express it. To my mind, this democratic imperative applies in virtually every circumstance.

Attentive readers will have already noticed that I wrote "virtually" just then, and it does not take a remarkably astute leap of deductive reasoning to work out that if I wrote "virtually", there was a "but" lurking there somewhere, waiting to crawl out from under its rock.

Well, here it is: everyone generally has a right to express his opinion but people like Mr Norman Lowell do not.

On Monday, I was settling down to a movie on the goggle-box and I had Twitter on, keeping an eye on the general pulse, as it were. I was advised through this medium (it is quite useful, once you figure out what it's for) to check out Bondi+, where the aforementioned Lowell was being interviewed, in a one-on-one setting, by the eponymous Lou.

The movie went on hold and I watched the rest of the programme, having missed a few minutes only.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Mr Lowell was ranting semi-incoherently in his usual manner, spouting all manner of crap. That word has been used in my regard on the electronic Times, so I'm justified in using it now. Mr Lowell's opinions are nothing more and nothing less than crap. Racist, misogynist, prejudiced, divisive crap.

If he has the guts, which he doesn't, he can sue me for libel, because I am calling him a shameless charlatan who uses half-baked ideas and pseudo-science to preen and wriggle, no doubt he imagines seductively, in the publicity this programme got him.

A man, if I can grace him with that appellation, who suggests that anyone who adopts a non-white should be deported along with the child he or she has adopted, or who openly advocates the killing of children born handicapped, deserves nothing less than being called a crap merchant.

Lowell accuses the Jews of everything that has gone wrong with the world and thinks Moslems should be sent back to their regions. He makes gross remarks about women and blacks, which in the most moronic redneck throwback to the late Fifties would sound revolting, much less coming from the mouth of someone with whom I am ashamed to share a passport.

He spouts crap, no more and no less.

So, why do I say that Lowell does not have the right to express his opinion, for all that it's the opinion of someone who seems to have the logical capacity of an idiot savant, who takes in words and phrases and spews them out in some form of order to justify his philosophies of ignorance?

Quite simple: he comes to the table of human rights, expecting to be allowed to dine with the rest of us, with dirty hands. He espouses the denial of basic rights to millions, born and unborn, and yet he expects to be granted the type of protection that he denies them.

That is not on. Lowell does not have the credentials even to glance at the menu, much less fill his boots.

You may ask why I've wasted so much time on this person: he's a joke, a bad joke at that, and deserves to be treated as such.

I would have agreed with you, having seen how the semi-literate idiots who infested vivamalta.org evaporated when their hero showed the world his true colours (yellow, for anyone who is wondering)

And I would almost - almost, but not quite - agree with what must have been the idea behind Bondi+ exposing the man for the intellectual phoney that he is: make him look like a laughing stock and you've condemned him to being a sick joke for ever.

But, sorry, no: there were too many comments on FaceBook which while paying lip-service to the idea that Lowell's ideas are beyond rubbish, used the usual code words of the bigots. "He's not completely wrong, you know" and "well, he has the right to his opinion and he has the guts to talk about things" are the sort of phrases that kept cropping up, along with "you might not agree with him, but you have to admit he‘s well-read".

These were people with the brains to use a computer: can you imagine the reactions of the illiterates for whom television is the only source of information?

And there's another facet to the programme that had me squirming: it was the knowledge that there were many people who were laughing their asses off at this sad and ludicrous human being. Not really such a leap from agreeing with him that the mentally defective should be put down, really, is it?

Lowell should not have been given the oxygen of publicity, however well-meaning was the underlying intent.