(Community Matters) Conversations over the last week have reminded me, I too can be badly behaved.
I’ve always believed in civility, and my passions sometimes runneth over. During the last week, some felt I created a hostile environment for those who disagree on the Muslim Community Center issue. That doesn’t create a space for dialogue nor certainly reconciliation.
Hope to better practice what I preach, which is that everyone I’m engaged with in conversation, or in community, who isn’t harming others, should enjoy these rights: 1) to be heard, 2) to be seen, 3) to feel safe, 4) to belong, 5) to make a difference.
I can’t promise to be perfect but I can promise to try hard to do better.
Community Matters 
Eugene, AFAIK you have the right, on your own turf/in your own blog to express what ever hostility you may feel short of threatening to do harm or inciting someone else to do harm. You have (admirably, in my view) elected to limit yourself by holding out the ideals you list in your post. I believe that you need not enjoin yourself from expressing hostility to _ideas_ that you find reprehensible and/or intolerable.
And as any offspring of a Southren Lady knows, it is certainly possible to express hostility and disdain with exquisite politeness.
Amen to what Don wrote. If people don’t like what you put on your blog, they comment on posts that upset them, perhaps starting a dialogue. (Or start their own blogs.) You disagree with the Park51 opponents to your heart’s content and as forcefully as you please. As long as you’re not attacking them personally, you can argue about any idea, opinion, or position with gusto. And if these kinds of strong discussions are happening with your friends, but assured that any friendship worthy of the name will be stronger for this sort of tempering.
Keep up the good fight.
I haven’t been talking about my comments on this blog. On an email list, I was not very gentlemanly, not willing to listen to other perspectives and used a nuclear option to annihilate, to shame an “opponent”. I accomplished my objective of securing the public support (ie, votes) I needed on the topic, but I nearly broke up the group.
When things get “Political” and “Passionate” sometimes people forget the common good over their desire for their own side winning (I am not talking about YOU in the above topic, as I have no idea about the situation you refer to or your actions of the “nuclear option”). I believe people on both sides of the “popular” issues look blindly at bad stuff on their side of the fence while passionately tossing bombs at the other side.
Eugene, usually you are open to diversity of opinions, even when they differ from yours…. which is something I learned from you and have tried to emulate. But all people get political and passionate…. so don’t beat yourself up too much.