Antiphon BANNED from Free Dominion!

Ok, fair comment, I was in fact a 'troll' on the site, one of those loathsome creatures who inhabit the net and visit sites where they can create the most inflammatory threads of commentary and controversy. As such, it was really only a matter of time before I raised enough ire to get kicked out.

In my case, I was picking on the Canadian conservative site 'Free Dominion'. Why them? Take a look at, and you'll see immediately why I couldn't resist the urge to take the piss out of them. The site specializes in stroking both the ego and moral superiority of the theocratic right. Anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-moderation, anti-Islam, anti-Liberalism and anti-tolerance sentiments abound. You literally can't visit a post that deals with anything gay related without encountering a sewer of filth from FD members, much of it likely qualifiable as hate speech (that said, I still maintain that hate speech laws are bad laws, and on free speech grounds I defend the site despite the toxic effuvian it's members spew).

In my defense, I was hardly the typical troll. I confined my commentary to SSM, and a handful of other issues that came up in relation to that topic. My tactics were simple, I took on the personage of a strict libertarian, one who would be firmly in the conservative camp on most fiscal, and foreign policy issues, but one who would be antithetical to the theocratic moralizing of the god-fearing far right the site caters to. This lead to some genuinely interesting exchanges among my first few dozen posts - especially my defense of SSM on the grounds that it promotes conservative values, but lately (post Harper victory) the denizens have been in a really poor mood.

You see, Harper is simply NOT RIGHT WING ENOUGH for them, and with a minority government that needs to be seen as moderate in order to survive, Harper won't be taking on any of the socially conservative policy initiatives that these FDers crave (i.e. banning abortion, banning sex ed, banning gays from the public sphere, stoning adulterous women, etc.). So the FD minions are not in any mood to be criticized, when at the very moment they should be feeling their oats, they find themselves still being locked out.

What fascinates me is that I got banned not for any of the really inflammtory stuff I posted aboutf religion/marriage and gays, no, I got banned because of disparaging arguments I made about the thesis of a gentleman named Bill Whatcott (who bills himself as 'Secretary of the Committee for Social Transformation'), but not on the topic of SSM, or gays, or even the value of religion in politics.

No I got banned because I came out vocally in favour of contraception as a means of reducing the need for abortions.

Apparently, pointing out that if they were intellectually serious about wanting to reduce abortions, the so-cons would endorse contraception and effective sex ed, was simply too much logic for their religion-stressed brains to take at once. This blog (from the US) has a chart that may explain why these two topics (contraception/abortion) cause such a short circuit in the brains of theocons.

No, as soon as they thought about women having the freedom to make decisions about their bodies by using birth control, and the 'out of control promiscuity' that this would inevtiably lead to, they shut down the thread, and kicked me from the site.

Am I sad about this? A little. I honestly found some of the people on the site to be challenging, and some to be very funny (and I even some who defended me - they were few and far between though), however most of them are complete and total dolts looking for a self affirmation of their more grotesque prejudices.

Them I won't miss.

Ah well. They were a diversion from real political theory, but an amusing one nevertheless. I will miss those cute little theocrats with their plans for both womb and world domination.