why me wrote:Ray A wrote:Gazelam would have no problem turning away one of his own children if they turned out Gay. In fact, he said he wouldn't have a problem drowning them, If I recall correctly.
So Gazelam got banned from a board? My heart bleeds for him.
I think that the point is: should he have been banned? And the answer is: probably not. However,
on boards that are critical of Mormonism and NOM is one of them, if a poster disagrees with the exmos, he or she is risking a ban, especially if they support the lds church on an issue. Democracy does not exist, except on this board.
You are showing your ignorance here, why me. The New Order Mormon board is not a place for wide-open debate, that is true. But it is not a friendly board for apostates to share opinions in anything but the most docile manner. I began posting on the NOM board in October 2005 after following a link from, of all places, Millennial Star. The NOM idea intrigued me. It was founded on the idea that one could reject some aspects of Mormonism that were distasteful or disagreeable while still maintaining ties to the community. I became a regular poster there and ran up several thousand posts. I even contributed to NOM Sunday School lessons. I spent a lot of time on some of my posts there. After some time, I decided the NOM lifestyle was not for me. I started hanging out more at a forum (the Foyer, later called Further Light and Knowledge) where critics could voice their dissatisfaction with the LDS church in more colorful terms than were allowed at the NOM board, which had what I felt was a pretty stifling set of rules for discourse (no cursing at all, no avatars that a TBM spouse looking over one's shoulder might find inappropriate, no direct confrontation, just a lot of diplomacyspeak). I and many of my disaffected friends pretty much got run off NOM and told to play at the FLAK playground so as not to scare off any lurking TBMs or newbie NOMs with our frank and pointed criticisms of the church and its leaders (NOM does not allow people to use acronyms such as TSCC or to call the church the Morg, for example).
Anyhoo, I was allowed to post at NOM but my posts were frequently edited by the moderators there, sometimes deleted, and I would get PMs from the mods telling me to tone it down, even when I felt I was being reasonable in expressing my views). The NOM board over time became more and more antagonistic to anyone who did not have a squishy middle-of-the-road personality and who veered too far to the side of either praising the church or criticizing it (with "too far" being capriciously determined by the moderators there).
Once, I was alerted on another board to a thread at NOM in which a fundamentalist Mormon was defending polygamy. I went over to check it out. I asked this fellow whether he agreed with the lifting of the priesthood ban. He began spewing racist BS (ala the LDS prophets pre-1978). I went ballistic on his ass. I got summarily banned for it. Not only was my account suspended, they deleted it, so no one could ever search for any of my posts by my screen name. They also banned my home IP address, so my wife and son who had an account there could not post. I know of many others on the "critical" side of things who have had similar run-ins over at NOM. It serves a very narrow purpose, and the moderating is heavy-handed and often arbitrary. I don't have huge problem with them deciding not to allow a free and open debate. We don't need every board to be a free-for-all. I moderate a board that does not allow TBMs to come on and bear testimony. Nothing wrong with that. The board is upfront about its purpose. The problem with NOM is that it has morphed into something it was not when I first went over there, and the standards of what is acceptable or not change with the whims of the moderators and their personal moods.
Anyway, my point is that NOM is a place for doubters and skeptics to voice (mild) criticisms of the church in a way that they hope is not too overly offensive to any TBM family members who might be lurking or looking at their browser histories. It's about helping people stay in the church even though they doubt or disagree with certain church policies. It's about helping them cope with fallout from their wards and their family members who are still connected. It's not about giving a voice either to true-believers or dissidents. Even if the dissidents in question have a long history in the community.
"The Church is authoritarian, tribal, provincial, and founded on a loosely biblical racist frontier sex cult."--Juggler Vain
"The lds church is the Amway of religions. Even with all the soap they sell, they still manage to come away smelling dirty."--Some Schmo