You have that last point all twisted again. I don’t mean I wasn’t giving permission to talk about that. I am explaining that I wasn’t specifically indicating that I thought it was a crucial fact, and not specifically inviting people’s opinions on that to be the focus. With or without my permission, they could of course focus on that detail as pivotal. But my mentioning it was meant to give a bigger, general picture of the people involved. Not to make it the pivotal point you and a few others seem to think it has to be.
Now I am shut of this. I can clarify my own remarks but I tire of others’ repetitious agenda.
As for me, I am not clear why implying that someone’s same-sex marriage status makes their family inferior is not treated as a personal attack, and I’m not clear whether analogous posts about someone’s religious status or racial status would be treated the same. Saying it’s a judgment call is begging the question.
Maybe he’s stockpiling them. Once he has enough, he’ll give them out to the poor posters who’re speaking in third person plural because they ran out of "I"s. This kind gift of Shodan’s would allow posting in first person singular.
I’m totally fine with those statements being made and unmoderated. They are not about the person being gay or black or atheist, they are about a behavior of being"in your face" or seeking attention.
I don’t think homosexuality being a choice or an inherent trait is relevant. It’s about being annoyed or uncomfortable with a certain kind of behavior. It would be reasonable to seek more information about the behaviors or refute the position, but those are valid points for discussion.
That’s a fair comment for that discussion, but not agood reason for moderator intervention.
I would totally have to see the pays in context. From further discussion here, it sounds like the comments cross the bounds from pointing out that lesbian couples may have an additional hurdle in that a mom must make the reminder role since there isn’t a dad to do it into judging the relationship as flawed. That might be worth moderator scrutiny.
I disagree. It is plausible their status as lesbians is relevant. Even possible that a gay culture in the home is a factor, though I doubt it. However, the tone of the posts was very judgemental.
Bingo.
Agreed.
Is the thread about the need for moderator action in that one case, or is the thread asking for clarification on how bigotry is/should be handled on the board? The thread started as the latter, but much of the debate is about the former, or even poking each other with a stick about what was meant and how relevant it was to the discussion.
Precipitated by that one post, and the decision not to moderate it, I’d like to see a slight shift in attitude among moderators, a shift that would incidentally result in moderation of that one post (and perhaps a couple of others like it in that thread). I think I’ve been pretty clear on what the shift would look like :).
Yes. People in that thread should have been told to take the debate about whether lesbian parenting is deficient to heterosexual parenting to another thread. Urbanredneck should have been told to take his stuff about the gay agenda to a thread about that.
Instead, you now have a thread that became so poisoned that it had to be thrown to the Pit because you guys couldn’t moderate it. You couldn’t keep an IMHO thread from becoming a Pit thread.
And you have poster who has said that she will never ask for parenting advice again, because she knows she will get attacked for being a lesbian parent. Because she is a lesbian, she can’t ask question that we straight people could ask–at least, not without being attacked for who she is. You’ve created de facto discrimination. Just like what happened with the sexual comments that you decided counted as hijacks, because you didn’t want women to feel unable to discuss certain topics.
And all you’d have to do to fix it is just moderate bigoted hijacks with existing rules. Instead of letting your discretion fall on the side of letting them continue, tell posters to take it to another thread. No one is censored, but an IMHO conversation can remain an IMHO conversation, instead of being a Pit thread–which it was well before it was moved.
I don’t get why you mods want to die on this hill.
I apologize. This was said in anger about this whole thing, and is not exactly what I meant.
What I don’t understand is why this is remotely controversial. As far as I know, it’s been standard practice. I don’t get the need for some mods to defend the moderation in that thread.
Yes, it’s a “judgment call.” And you made a wrong one, one that is inconsistent with past moderation and turned the thread into a mess.
BigT, I think you make some really good points. For me, the thread turned from parenting into a referendum on gay parenting with the first obvious gay-attack post. After that, and a few others that fell in that category, I really couldn’t listen to posts that made good points but included having two moms as parents as a possible factor. I’m guilty of shutting down that way but I can only work to avoid that in the future.
Back to ATMB. I wish that the attack posts had been moderated in the ways you suggest. I know they were reported, but not by me. I’ll be more responsible about reporting such posts myself, but I would like it if the mods were more sensitive to the nature of these posts when they are about homosexuality as when they are bigoted about other aspects of diversity.
I now have the perspective that there are a few blatant bigots who weren’t spanked as they would have been if they spoke equally blatantly of another disenfranchised (or whatever) group. But mostly, I am overwhelmed by the intelligent, thoughtful, moral posters who took up the issue and made salient the problem with what was going on. We’re building more equality and acceptance overall–and what is fighting ignorance, but that?
Lots of the moderating that happens on this board happens in order to keep threads from being derailed, or to keep people from being jerks. So I don’t think it’s much of an objection to LHoD’s proposed rule that it would “censor” speech, as tomndebb put it. Mods censor all kinds of speech on this board. They aren’t the government. They are private actors whose job is to facilitate interesting, educational, or entertaining discussion.
It seems to me that those opposing such a rule still haven’t answered the basic question of whether sexual orientation is to be treated differently from race or religion. If Shodan asks for advice about why he can’t get his truck to start, am I permitted to suggest in IMHO that it is because he is white and white people are clumsy? Or that it’s because he is a Catholic and doesn’t understand science? I assume not. So why is this different?
As a basic rule, I don’t think it should be moderated differently.
In this case, it appears that certain comments should have been moderated more stringently, as they were more derogatory rants on lesbian lifestyle rather than comments on the topic of kids forgetting Mother’s Day.
Comments that asked if that played a role because there wasn’t a Dad there to take the lead seem reasonable. Comments deriding lesbian parents should be shut down/redirected to the appropriate place.
People were weighing in on that aspect because in their opinion it was a relevant factor. Its not bigoted to think that it was a relevant factor, its not insulting to think that it was a relevant factor, and believing that it was a relevant factor does not mean that they hate gay people or think they are inferior. All relationships have their own dynamics and in your case, whether you like it or not, its perfectly valid to posit that the dynamic of a lesbian relationship might just have some relevance to the issue of freaking Mothers day!
Just because one single poster went out of line does not mean that you should be able to shut down the numerous other posters who did think that aspect was a factor.
It is possible that the lack of a father figure might influence if a child forgets Mother’s day. It is much less possible that being Catholic would influence whether or not I can get a truck to start.
I suppose if I posted something like “I can’t get my truck started, and by the way I’m white” as if race might be relevant, then it would be legitimate to comment on race if one thought it related to the OP. That’s what happened in the thread under discussion. tapu made it clear that she meant to refer to the fact that she is in a lesbian relationship in her OP.
As mentioned, I have rarely seen it done successfully where someone starts a thread about an issue, mentions something, but says “but that has nothing to do with it and don’t talk about it” and actually has it work out that way.
Or, I dunno, coming up with an example off the top of my head, you might post something like, “I can’t get my truck started, it’s in my church’s parking lot,” and have people come in and start mocking you for being Christian, telling you that maybe you should waste less time praying to the sky pixie and more time learning car mechanics. And when you correctly objected that that’s threadshitting, they’d say, “You’re the one who brought up religion in the OP, not me!” as if that were an excuse.
You seem rather determined not to understand - religion is not usually relevant to starting trucks, and family structure is often relevant to family issues. So your example is (obviously) remarkably stupid.
Bringing things up that might be relevant is not threadshitting. Bringing things up that aren’t, is threadshitting. Fortunately, the mods understand this, even if you cannot bring yourself to do so.
I happen to agree with this point, but it’s more subjective than you’re presenting it.
If you start with the premise - as do many righteous people in this and the other threads - that there’s absolutely no reason to believe that there might be any problems whatsoever that lesbian two-mother families are predisposed to (other than those caused by bigots), then it would follow that the family being a lesbian two-mother family is about as relevant to any family problem as being religious is to starting a truck.
Now you would think the premise is ridiculous (as do I) but a lot of people disagree, and from their perspective the analogy works, and there’s a double-standard in not recognizing it.
So it’s a judgment call. Essentially the moderators not taking action in cases of this sort amounts to a position by the moderators that all these PC People are wrong, and that the notion that there are problems caused by the lesbian two-mother family dynamic is not as ridiculous as the notion that religious people can’t get their trucks started. Which is fine with me because I happen to agree with that position. But the point is that the standard is not something that can be established on any purely objective basis.
You forgot an “i”, by the way.