A while back I put up a post about the different attitude toward disagreement on political blogs and non-political blogs. I noted that
One surprising lesson I've learned is that people take offense much more easily on parenting blogs than at places like Daily Kos and MyDD.
Well, in the past few days I have gotten myself banned at a blog for the first time ever. It was Jess's Christian parenting/simple living blog Making Home, where I had been commenting for a few months. Jess is one of those bloggers who moderates comments not to screen out spam but to screen out views she considers “personal attacks” or intended to lead her readers astray.
I had tangled with the blogger before, resulting in her censoring my comments, but the last straw for her was the thread below this post, in which she made all kinds of ridiculous assertions about evil society vs. perfect Christian womanhood. She did post my first comment, under which she commented that in the south they have a saying: if you throw a rock over a fence, it's the hit dog that hollers.
Meaning that if I objected to her absurd stereotypes about women who don't share her values, my disagreement is proof that she must be right and must have struck a nerve.
I tried to respond to her (and to her husband, who fancies himself a real Biblical scholar) several more times, but never made it through her editorial screen again.
Elsewhere on the thread, I noticed that Jess, her husband and several of her readers tag-teamed to attack “Christine,” who had previously identified herself on the blog as a terminally ill theology student who had felt Jesus Christ's healing power in her own life. Christine's version of Christian faith was insufficiently judgmental and narrow-minded for Jess. I felt bad for her, but when I tried to post a comment supporting her, of course Jess did not let it through.
I don't post this in any effort to drum up a blogswarm, because there's no point–Jess would never let any of those comments through either.
But I did find it amusing that after years of participating in all kinds of arguments at Daily Kos and MyDD, handing out and receiving fewer than a dozen troll ratings during all of that time, I managed to get banned from one of these non-political blogs in a matter of months. It's amazing how thin-skinned some of these people are.
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