Peter LaBarbera at AmericansForTruth has pointed us to an excellent answer to the question, "Why don't you allow comments on your blog?" Like LaBarbera and Mr. Cramer (see his blog posting below), we have been subject to vile language, threats, harassment, even a house break-in, by activists in the LGBT community. They do not believe in free speech or the polite exchange of ideas.
Why there are no comments on my blog
Pam Spaulding, a lesbian blogger, posted something about Americans for Truth About Homosexuality, which is run by Peter LaBarbera. Like many blogs, Pam’s blog allows readers to add comments–which soon included Peter LaBarbera’s home address, and a suggestion that the park across the street would be a good place for a sniper.
Comments on blogs can either be moderated (which ends up taking a lot of a blogger’s time) or unmoderated (in which case, the blogger may not be aware of what’s being said in the comments). Once informed, Pam Spaulding removed these comments and emphasized that this was not acceptable behavior.
That’s why I have never turned commenting on in my blog. Who needs the aggravation of letting unhinged idiots post trash like that (and worse) in the comments?
I can’t say that I am surprised by what happened on Pam Spaulding’s blog, however. Over the roughly twenty years that I have been using the Internet to engage in political discussion, I have expressed myself strongly (sometimes even a little too strongly) about a very large number of controversial issues. There is one, and only one group of political activists that have ever made harassing phone calls to me (repeated calls at 6:00 AM with silence at the other end), made lewd phone calls to my children (who fortunately, were small enough to be confused rather than shocked), tried to get me fired from a job, or threatened my safety with threats of violence.
Guess which group that was. Not leftists. Not gun control activists. No Islamists. Not Communists. Not labor unionists. Not history professors. Not environmentalists. Homosexual activists are the only group that has engaged in these tactics in response to my political free speech. Obviously, not all homosexuals––or even all homosexual activists––have engaged in these tactics. But part of why I have joined the ranks of those who think that homosexuality reflects something terribly broken is because there is no other group whose activists become so unhinged in response to criticism that they engaged in these tactics. I have never felt at risk because of my political activity–until the unrelenting campaign of harassment started in the early 1990s, and I started to regularly carry a gun because of it.
