(Note: I wrote up this long post last night before everyone had started being all friendly and stuff, but then the board was down, so I couldn’t post it, and now it’s a bit out of date… I mean, c’mon guys, this is the Pit! If you want to cheerfully revel in the common bonds of humanity and intellectual brotherhood, can’t you find another forum? 
)
I think that there’s another reason for some perceived unfairness of standards… although this can be a subtle and tricky issue.
When someone says something that’s potentially hateful, the level of alarm with which the mods, and the community as a whole, respond, is sometimes proportional to the likelihood that the hate speech on the SDMB might correspond to hateful and damaging actions in real life, and to the general levels of power and security of the attacked group as a whole.
There is some non-zero number of actual physical life-threatening crimes committed against gay people in the US every year due to their sexuality. If someone comes onto the board and says something along the lines of “I hate all those damn gay people! I think they should die!”, they’ll almost certainly be banned instantly, because it’s all too plausible that they might literally mean what they say. And even if that specific poster doesn’t mean it, there are people in the world who do, and that knowledge is always present in the minds of the moderator who reads that post.
On the other hand, suppose someone shows up and types “I hate all those damn Christians! I think they should die!”. That’s still (obviously) awfully hateful, and might easily result in banning. But to me, (I’m neither gay nor Christian), it seems far less frightening and disturbing.
If there are actual physical, life-threatening hate crimes committed against Christians, they certainly aren’t well publicized (no doubt due to the vast liberal media conspiracy). One nut raving on a message board about his hatred for gays might well be a part of the actual, real life, anti-gay movement. Except in the minds of a certain Alabama judge, there is no actual, real life anti-Christian movement… certainly not one that includes frequent life-threatening acts of violence.
This is actually an issue which has a lot of shades of grey, which applies not just to hate speech and death threats, but to various levels of teasing, mockery, etc. The fact of the matter is that Christians are a huge majority in the US as a whole, and occupy many of the positions of power. (The same could be said of white folks, for that matter). That means that mocking of, and hatred towards, whites and Christians, at a variety of levels of seriousness, doesn’t bring with it the same history, implications, and ominous overtones that precisely the same behavior or actions directed at gays, blacks, post-9/11-Muslim-Americans or other less powerful groups does.
It’s in some ways a double standard, I agree. And I don’t know how often it actually affects moderator behavior. But if it does, I don’t honestly think it’s in any way indicative of meaningful, disturbing, protest-worthy prejudice.
Two comments specifically for Libertarian:
(1) You say that you didn’t choose Christianity, rather, it chose you. I have no reason not to believe your sincerity. But I know of countless cases of people changing religions over the course of their lives, often out of something approaching conscious choice. On the other hand, I know of few, if any, cases of people changing sexuality over the course of their lives. Thus, I tend to view religion, but not sexuality, as something-that-can-be-chosen.
You might argue that you becoming Christian, after not earlier identifying as Christian, is precisely analogous to someone identifying as straight and then coming out as gay. And, again, I can’t meaningfully argue with your claim about yourself. But I see a problem with that analogy (assuming it’s one you might make), which I will attempt to illustrate with a hypothetical:
Suppose you had been abducted at birth by biologically-human people from another dimension or planet and had grown up in a world in which there was no such thing as Christianity (if you want to argue that your beliefs claim that no such society could exist, suppose that you were carried back in time and grew up in Ancient Greece). And suppose you were raised as a believer in one of the religions and belief systems of that world. Would you, at some point upon reaching adulthood, “come out” and realize “wow, this isn’t really me, I’m XXX”, where XXX is the concept of Christianity, which you believe in, and identify with, even if you aren’t able to give it a name?
Honestly, I have trouble believing that that would be the case. Whereas I have no trouble at all believing that a gay man who was raised from birth in a society full of straight people would still end up feeling sexual attraction to other men.
Actually, after having typed all of that up, I’ve come up with a different, more meaningful, way to say what I’m trying to say:
You say that you don’t choose to be a Christian, rather, you just are a Christian.There are other things that you don’t choose. In your case, you didn’t choose to be male. You just are one. You didn’t choose to be (whatever race you are). You just are.
So I compare that to what I know about myself. Like you, I am the gender and race (male and white, in my case), that I was born. I have no choice about that. But I am not a Christian. Rather, I am an agnostic-liberal-with-libertarian-beliefs-on-social-issues. And, in some ways, I didn’t choose to be that. Certainly, I never consciously sat down and said to myself “hmmmm… eenie, meenie, miney, moe, what belief system will I have”. And there’s also an extent to which I can’t change my beliefs. If someone offered me a billion dollars to believe in God, I couldn’t do it. (I would certainly be willing to lie about it for a billion dollars, but that’s neither here nor there.)
On the other hand, I’m in no way going to claim that my being agnostic is as certain, unchangeable, foreordained, predestined, and unchooseable as my being white. Heck, it’s certainly possible that I won’t be an agnostic a year from now, albeit unlikely. And who knows what I would believe if I’d had different parents, different experiences through life, a different society surrounding me, etc.
So, when I’m evaulating and attempting to understand what you say about yourself and your not-choosing-Christianity, bearing in mind that I can only interpret things in the context of who I am and what I know from my own perspective, I view your Christianity as far more analogous to my agnosticism than to my maleness.
Therefore, while I believe that you speak with absolute honesty and firmness of belief and intent, I don’t, honestly, believe that you are correct, at least not if you claim that your Christianity is, like race, or, to a debatably lesser extent, sexual orientation, a foreordained biological certainty.
(2) Hijacking briefly, in your thread “criticize me”, I wrote that I wished you would return to the lengthy and contentious discussion of multi-universe-logic and the ontological proof. You then indicated (I thought) that you were interested in doing so. Have you done so? Did I miss one or more posts or threads?
I’m not following you there with your logic. You mean like, “The SDMB - Love It or Leave It!” Hey, that could be it’s new raison d’etre! Who cares about ignorance, anyway, except the ignorant… 