Banned Again

Whatever liberals may claim to be, open minded they are not. I participate in discussions in both liberal and conservative discussion groups, and have been both applauded and flamed on both since I tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I have never had a post deleted or been banned by a conservative group, but have had both happen on liberal groups.

The latest was when a poster bragged about having a friend who was a former illegal alien who had become a citizen, who wrote that the friend said that he would never vote for Republicans “if they tried to take his citizenship away.” The writer went on to say that Republicans opposed immigration because it would increase the number of Democratic voters.

I asked why immigrants would automatically be Democrats. Would it be, I asked, because Democrats “gave them citizenship?” If so, that would be voting based on bribery. I pointed out that the poster’s friend by his own statement was refusing to vote for Republicans because they would not give him what he wanted, that is to say would not bribe him. I added that there is no mechanism in this country for stripping a person of citizenship, so the friend’s statement made no sense, and went on to say that no one should feel bad, because pretty much all voters today vote based on bribes. “I voted for Blah because he cut my taxes.”

My comment was replaced by a notice that an “offensive comment” had been deleted as well as the commenter’s name, and that my “posting privileges” had been cancelled. In all fairness, conservatives do not like to be disagreed with either, but they do not try to erase the existence of opposing views altogether. Conservatives will call me some fairly nasty names, but they don’t try to pretend that I don’t exist.

I would actually agree that the deleted comment has something of an offensive nature, but there is a larger point that the ban missed, which is the frequency with which people unashamedly admit to utterly selfish reasons for their votes. A vote was based on “lowering my taxes,” or on the basis that the representative “brings more federal money into my district,” or “protects my Social Security,” or other ways in which the vote represents the personal benefit to the voter. That was the point which I made in the post, but apparently the “jury” only read part of my post and hit “ban.”

A couple of liberal blogs have banned me permanently, so...