The best defense is to claim offense.
Evelyn Beatrice Hall once summed up Voltaire's views on discourse thusly:
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
These words have been used time and again in public debate in order to succinctly express the view of the speaker that the First Amendment protects the free speech of all citizens, no matter how offensive or unpopular that speech might be.
The attitude behind this phrase is one of the larger reasons I became a liberal. Now I find myself asking "where has this attitude gone?"
You see, when someone alerts on a post, one of the reasons they can provide as an argument for hiding the post is that it is (to sum up "hurtful, rude, insensitive" from the alert box) offensive. Should a majority of the jury agree that the post is offensive, the post is hidden, and consequences are handed down to the offending poster.
The problem I have with this is that unpopular/minority opinions are always offensive to someone, and they stand a good chance of being offensive to a majority of jury members. So for those members of the majority who feel uncomfortable when greeted with minority views, the best defense is to claim offense.
And now to confirm the suspicions of some readers, and to make a point as to why I posted this here, let me say this: There is no discussion topic more likely to fall victim to this phenomenon on a liberal board than that of religion. For my entire life, spanning from my fundamentalist Christian years to the atheism of now, my very existence has been offensive to some. Liberal Christians thought I was ruining their religion when I was younger, and they think I'm trying to undermine and eliminate it now.
The jury system isn't going anywhere, and we all know it. That means that on DU3, it will always be possible for the majority to defend themselves against minority views by claiming offense. (It also means that things which offend minorities stand a much higher chance of standing, but that's beside my larger point.) This is unfortunate, to say the least, but we as a group can do better.
Those who venture into the Religion forum must know that the very discussion of such a topic will be volatile. We all need to keep Ms. Hall's words in mind, and maybe some of us should grow some skin.
Or, we could just admit that when it comes to our pet topics we are just as reactionary and in favor of censorship as the people on the right whom we deride.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Dude, that is some funny shit right there.
But its not an uncommon display of hypocrisy, saying you want your beliefs questioned, and when they are, calling the questions insulting and bigoted.
there are many cases where we would disagree with the jury decision, and of course it's not fool proof - nothing is. But it's a new more communal system and so far much better than moderators, who are anything but immune to the Stanford Prison Experiment -effect.
I thought peer review was something that you were much in favor for, and this is a system of your posts getting judged by peers, fellow posters. In ancient Athens which also had a judicial system based on peer review and drawing lot, there was a system of that the accuser faced similar punishment that he was demanding, if the accused was found not guilty, in order to avoid abuse of the system. In some other forums I've suggested that if someone demands that some other poster be banned, there is a judgment by peers and if they don't ban the accused, the accuser gets banned. I don't know how something like that could be created to sanction unnecessary alerts and attempts to abuse the jury system, maybe there are good ideas but discussion about them should continue in the meta.
I don't know what is the mount of evidence you are referring to, a quick lurk in your safe haven or mutual support group hinted that cleanhippie, perhaps together with some others - haven't really looked into it - has continued the battle of words with militant hard-line feminism (or a feminist), and in my experience that is generally unwise. 
my ability to see into the future?! 
While not in agreement with the content, I saw nothing wrong in post #31, on the contrary it gave opportunity to flabber my mouth more in defense of peer review system.
