What is the outrageous sense of entitlement that makes all these folks think they get a vote on what Broadsheet should cover, should be? This isn't a democracy folks, no magazine is. They put out what they want, and you read it if you want. As it stands, readers are damn lucky to have these comment threads at all.

You think a certain slant or area of coverage would be interesting, go found your own website, it isn't all that hard or expensive these days, and if you are right you might even generate enough traffic to make a bit of beer money on ads.

And besides, if you want Broadsheet to cover a certain kind of thing, vicious personal insults, ad hominem attacks, broad smears, enraged denunciations, and pathetic whining, don't seem like a very effective way to go about it. Me, I don't take Broadsheet to be the Official Voice of Feminism, or even of any particular brand of feminism, nor do I feel obliged to agree with everything or indeed anything in it, or even find each and every story even interesting (as I don't with everything in Salon, for example Carry Tennis...).

Me, I'm just an occasional pretty much non-vitriolic poster, and in just the last few days I've been called a dirtbag, drunk, joke, idiot, sheep, and god knows what else (I rarely read the anonymice posts past the first few lines), which is tame compared to what the writers get. If I were them, I doubt I would read much of this drivel either, and certainly not respond to it.

Indeed, I've gotten to the point that I am beginning to think that they should shut down the comments on Broadsheet, let readers send them a letter if they want, and then publish a compendium of good ones once a week or so. This is not a great solution, but it might be the only viable one until some courtesy, decorum and class can manifest itself. I do wonder how many people with something interesting or insightful to contribute have been driven off by all the nastiness.

You are so tone deaf that you mistake a lack of invective and vitriol for support for the status quo. Some of us can communicate in a reasonable, courteous fashion. This is called being civilized. And I am also a gentleman; in the current environment, indeed I do go out of my way to be respectful of the Broadsheet writers: it may be old-fashioned and sexist, but even basic human decency indicates that anybody subjected to the attentions of a pack of cads deserves some support.

And please enlighten us, if you and all the anonymice and your little group of friends find that Broadsheet sucks so much, why on earth do you continue to read it? My understanding of troll behaviour is that a troll is someone who doesn't really care about the subject, just wants to have a loud abusive argument with lots of namecalling and rage. Since you all seem to agree that Broadsheet is terrible, the only conclusion I can come to is that you come here for the sole purpose of behaving like a troll.

I actually had a mildly insulting comment deleted! There actually is someone trying to moderate this mess?

(I still regret that I did not register as Canuckistan Bobbi, so I too could pretend to be a girl.)

The actual fact is that almost every baby is conceived for the wrong reasons. When you are in those prime baby-making years, you are way too inexperienced and stupid to know what you are getting into, and almost every decision you make will be shallow and stupid. It is called being young, which is when you make babies.

In my 40s now, I only regret that I did not have more, especially considering how great the three I have have turned out. Well, that was all I could afford. But the thought does occur, isn't rich people having lots of heirs to subdivide their concentrations of wealth, like, a Good Thing?

Making a baby is really cool, in that the fact, a new person, is not tainted by the stupid motivations that caused them. Making a baby is pretty much always about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons; why should rich people's reasons be any more contemptuous than poor people's?

If the SD Fire Department is anything like most other municipal fire departments in North America, which tend to be the last bastions of he-man machoness, I bet that the rank and file are simply delighted to to have a female chief, and even more delighted that she is an out lesbian. I would expect that they would take pretty much every possible opportunity to make life difficult for her. And indeed, her making them attend the parade was probably by way of a little re-education. Just speculating, mind you.

At first I wondered how many sex-offenders there are out there that want to attend church (especially Unitarian Church), so this might be much ado about very little. But then I realized, given the broad-brush used nowadays to determine "sex-offenders" (the story in Broad Sheet last week about the school boys, the story last year http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/07/18/photos/index.html about the family investigated on the basis of some innocent pictures), there might be no small number of pretty good hearted people living with an unreasonable designation.

I think more to the point might be how can churches serve out and out pedophiles, which is a different kettle of fish entirely. I've been manfully resisting making any Catholic jokes here, but there at least adult-only type services are available, which seems like a pretty effective solution.