Well, Ryan, the fact of the matter is that you are the single poorest communicator on these boards. Semi-literate leet-speak teenagers have better luck getting their point across. Virtually without fail, any time you involve yourself in a debate, it devolves into a morass of “I didn’t say that,” and “That’s not what I meant.” After a certain point, you have to consider that the fault may not be with your audience, but with yourself.
Take this thread, for example. You come here out of the blue and say, “It is absurd to claim that [denying legal recognition of gay marriage] is bigotry,” with absolutely no support. Why did you wait three posts to clarify that you’re defining bigotry as malicious discrimination? Why not put that right in your first post? “This isn’t bigotry, because bigotry is malicious, and I don’t think there’s any maliciousness here.” It would make your point instantly clear, it would shepherd discussion towards a meaningful end (wether or not people oppose gay marriage out of maliciousness), and people would probably not groan in dismay every time you enter a debate.
You also tend to state a subjective opinion as objective fact. You’ve done that here, twice. First, when you define bigotry as only being malicious. Not all dictionaries agree on that qualifier, and even if they did, you ought to be aware both that most people do not use dictionary-precise definitions in casual speech, and that dictionaries are by nature behind the curve of language usage. At the same time, you are stating as a fact that people who are against gay marriage are not doing so out of maliciousness. Now, personally, I don’t think there is a credible argument that this is anything other than malicious. That said, there is plenty of room for debate on the issue, but only if the other debators are aware that the issue exsists.
Finally, it appears that you are wholly ignorant of subtext. I’m going to predict that, at some point in this thread, someone is going to call you a homophobe, which you will respond to by denying and demanding evidence of where you said anything homophobic. And you will be correct, you will (likely) have not said anything homophobic. But you will also be completely ignoring the context of your statements, both within the thread itself and within Western society in general. And the context is, people who argue against gay marriage are frequently homophobic. Since you insist on posting one or two line conclusions without spelling out the premises by which you arrived at that conclusion, people are going to eventually start reading the most likely premises into your posts.
In sum, your posts are gnomic in that you insist on making short statements and presenting them as a universal truth, and you are opaque in that you are somehow reluctant to reveal the reasoning behind your arguments. Both of these are sure-fire recipes for miscommunication, and they are wholly and entirely your fault. They are, however, easily correctable if you are willing to consider how others might misinterpret your posts and make the simple effort to explain yourself so that obvious misinterpretations are avoided.
I know that wiser and more esteemed Dopers have made these same observations to you before, and they have had little impact on your posting style. I expect this post will meet with similar results. Which is a shame, because I think you are a genuinely intelligent person with a definite contribution to make. But communication has to be worked at from both ends, and until you are willing to make the effort to ensure you are properly understood, you are going to continue to be dismissed by most other posters as a blow-hard and border-line troll more obsessed with arguing meaningless points of semantics then engaging in an honest debate.
