Discussion on political threads, potential for inflammatory speech

I've been thinking about posting this as something of an open discussion for a bit, given how the US political happenings of the past few months (and the future few months) have galvanized discussions here. Here's what I'd been writing a bit earlier:

"This is obviously the first time that Etsy and the Etsy Forums have been here on the heels of a US presidential election. It can be difficult to accurately gauge how the posting members of the community will react to the situation, and how they'll react to the opinions of one another. Obviously religion and politics draw strong reactions, but we've been able to maintain discussions around both that stay pretty aboveboard in the past.

Many of the threads surrounding US politics recently have become pretty intense, sometimes in a pretty bad way. You're absolutely right in that some threads have gone on for longer than they should have," - and while we still need to read through the content of these threads most often before taking decisive action, we're still interested in taking -faster- action so that these political discussions can remain respectful and be allowed to continue.

Now, with all that said, you know as well as I do that discussion about sensitive topics like (but certainly not limited to) religion and politics can put prejudices of all sorts on display, against a myriad of characteristics that are really too numerous to name here. Is this an excuse to be permissive towards prejudice against ethnicity and nationality specifically? Absolutely not. And I can tell you that I'll take the feedback that you've presented thus far to Mary and the rest of the Community team so that we can discuss everything you've said and see what we can do to be better at our jobs, to encourage good discussion and to actively steer community members away from discussion that belittles people at least on the basis of their ethnicity or nationality.

In the meantime, let me see if I can get a specific bit of feedback from you. I want you to, -without- using examples of behavior you've seen on these Forums (because I'm intent upon having no one call out in doing this, and this is not the place to express your displeasure against any specific person), draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable speech, here in the Etc. forums, as you see it. Tell me what you think is the very limit of something that's acceptable to say here, the kind of thing that makes you a little iffy but ultimately you're all right with, and then tell me what kind of speech takes the one remaining tiny step into "unacceptable" territory. Ignore the "this is clearly okay" and "this is clearly not okay" examples and focus on what rides on either side of that line.

I'm asking you this because I think it will provide a good sense of perspective on how you're seeing what you're seeing on the Forums, aside from what's already been said and what you've written to us at community (!at) etsy dot com.

Also, and hey, I know you've been patient for reading all of this so far, but thanks to those of you who are discussing this respectfully and sharing your thoughts with us!

Posted at 8:18pm Sep 1, 2008 EDT