Reply #11: Matcom you keep on not listening to me... [View All]

[VelmaD]

I never said I wanted to ban the word. My biggest complaint with the threads that Skinner started in GD about this was that he used the word "ban". It set it up for the conversation to be ugly IMO.

What I want is for the rules to be applied even-handedly. We already have rules about racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-religious and anti-athiest posts. We don't "ban" the "n" word. But people generally don't use it unless we're having a conversation about the use of racist, sexist, homophobic etc language. You would never see someone post "Colin Powell is a 'n'" on DU and if they did it would get pulled by the mods in record time. Yet people feel it's ok to post "Condi Rice is a 'b'".

People don't use the "n" word, not even in talking aboiut our opposition, because they've been told that it is offensive and they don't want to offend African-American DUers. I would hope for the same consideration for female DUers. I'm not talking about the mods censoring speech. I'm not talking about the FCC. I'm talking about consideration for the feelings of others and a littel self-censorship like we all do with some other offensive words already.