New Blog Rules, Effective NOW

I am changing Public Catholic’s board rules to the following language:

I want Public Catholic to be a welcoming place. As my mother would say, be polite. What that means is use courtesy and civility. It also means do not attempt to hijack the board with your personal agendas. Public Catholic is a Catholic, Christian blog. I created it to empower Christians to stand for Jesus in today’s world. Reptitive, harassing attacks against the faith, Jesus or the Church are not welcome here. Address others with respect and refer to public figures in the same way. No name calling. No cursing. No hitting. No spitting.

These new blog rules will be up in the next day or so. In the meantime, I ask that people who post here abide by them, beginning now.

My reason for changing the language is that some of the posters here seem focused on repetitive posts that are so argumentative and frequent that they are taking over the conversations on Public Catholic and focusing it on the poster’s agenda. I do not want Public Catholic hijacked. I want its focus to stay with what I created it to be in the first place. I also do not want other people to stop commenting here because they feel driven out by a large number of repetitive and destructive comments from people who are pushing their private, anti-Christian agenda.

I created Public Catholic as a response to this exact sort of thing which is being directed at Christians everywhere in our larger society. While I welcome intelligent discussion, what I’m seeing here has devolved to hectoring. As I said, it is also repetitive. We get it: You are atheists. You don’t need to tell us over and over again.

Also, this is a Christian blog. It is a Catholic blog. It is not the appropriate place for repeated attacks on the faith and Christian belief. Each one of the people who have been making these posts has their own blog. I think that is a more appropriate place for them to further their personal agendas.

I do not and will not come on their blogs just to argue with them about their beliefs. While I do not share their beliefs, I have too much respect for their right to hold them to do that. They are free to believe whatever they want. They are also free, within reason, to say what they believe here. But somewhere between the first and the 50th time they tell Public Catholic commenters that there is no god is enough said.

I don’t want to delete comments and deny people the opportunity to post here. If you will just follow this rule change, I won’t have to.