Politics and Current Events arouse passion. They should, too -- it's about the stuff that affects all of us, from how much gas costs, to whether or not it's safe to give that hormone-laced milk to your kids.
You WILL comport yourselves with civility here or you will be blocked from the Politics Forum entirely.
Cribbed from Roger, in a thoughtful response to my request for input:
Opinions, ideas, and beliefs are fair game for disrespect. People and groups are not.
Examples:
1) "Christianity is the greatest blight ever visited upon humanity."
Fair game. That's an opinion which can be debated. You can present arguments for and against it.
2) "Christians are intolerant bigots."
Not appropriate. First of all, it characterizes a hugely diverse group of people down to a single characteristic. No one can possibly say what all people of a group are, and it's wrong on the face of it. Some Christians are bigots, some are not, some fall somewhere in the middle.
3) "Some Christians I've known are bigots."
Still not appropriate. While there are indeed Christian bigots and the poster may have known them, it adds nothing to a discussion. So what? Nearly every group has some member which holds any single characteristic. It's a null argument. It's single purpose is to slide example 2 under the door as a direct observation.
4) "James Dobson is a bigot."
Fair game. He's a prominant political figure. He's put himself in the spotlight and arguments can be presented for and against.
5) "You are an idiot."
Not appropriate. A poster may be uniformed about a particular topic, but no one deserves to be called an idiot. Seldom are these posts this blatant, but usually the implication is clear.
I've used Christianity here in my examples, but this is certainly not limited to that. You can replace it with Democrat, Republican, George Bush, whatever.
Finally:
Don't act like a jerk. You don't name-call, or bait, or sneer, or taunt, or generally be unpleasant to the people around you; at least, not if you want to stay here very long.
You might find a joke gets deleted, or a thread gets locked, that seems perfectly innocent, to you. Usually, if that happens, it's because there were people who were much less comfortable with it. The complexity and diversity in our backgrounds can be much more difficult to face and deal with, honestly, when things are couched in terms of "gosh, it was all just in good fun" because of the built-in refusal to examine underlying attitudes of exclusion, or "I'm normal and you're not" -- which by extension implies that anyone who insists on examining exactly that is humorless and "PC."
Which reminds me -- accusing each other of "being PC" when you disagree really isn't cool. And what it usually boils down to is that someone is being a jerk or a bigot -- maybe inadvertently, maybe not -- and gets called on it which makes that person defensive.
You'll notice, please, I'm also not demanding that anyone agree with my worldview. You don't have to. And you can absolutely debate and discuss and tell me you think I'm wrong, and why you think so -- PMs are usually more appropriate for that, but if it's a discussion that you honestly believe would benefit the community, I'm willing to have that discussion on the boards in public, too.
What members (and
all of us are members, mods too) don't get to do is marginalize other members. And we have Muslims and Catholics and Moral-Majority conservative Pentecostals. Republicans and Libertarians and Anarchists. We have brown people, pink people, pot-smokers, hippies, suburban moms, ex-cons, ex-cops, and Homeland Security specialists. We have married folks, and polyamorous folks, and singles and swingers and queers.
I'm not inclined to try and prevent people from thinking and believing whatever they're inclined to think and believe -- whether they're fanatic adherents to the use of the serial comma, or won't use any capital letters or commas at all. It would be a fool's errand, for one thing, and this would be a rather stagnant and boring community, for another.
I'm also not inclined to let people behave like bullies about their beliefs.
My concern about this stuff is largely in terms of building and maintaining a mostly-egalitarian community, at least as much as humanly possible.
Because what happens when you get a preponderance of members who tend to agree and share a cultural background, and they take for granted or actively put forth -- even it it's never said in so many words -- that their world view is the only "normal" or "right" world view, is that people who see things differently finally just quietly go away.
I have a vested interest in not letting that happen, here.
