A general word of warning. (Disclaimer I'm for gay marriage, but that is not the point of the following text.) I have been subscribed to the main mailing list

A general word of warning. (Disclaimer I'm for gay marriage, but that is not the point of the following text.) I have been subscribed to the main mailing list of the German Pirate party for four years now and from this very rich data set I can give you the following piece of insight: Discussions about LGBT issues will invariably degenerate into pure horribleness. It might not be obvious to most people why this should be the case, but believe me, if there is only one single troll that knows one of the big red buttons to push, the whole thing goes off the rails. I'm reeeally uncertain if I should do this, but to illustrate my point, I'm now going to describe one of those buttons: Many of the LG and B people are not really comfortable with the T people (and some are quite T-phobic!). A troll that identifies one of those anti-T LGB posters can "craft" a post that destroys any room that might have been there for meaningful discussion. At least this has been my experience on that particular mailing list. While the conversational level of the HN community is fortunately well above that of said list, I already see some pre-pathologies which indicate that HN might not be immune to the LGBT-shitstorm-effect. My personal feelings about this particular instance, without knowing any details are this: Guy I've never heared of before with anti gay-marriage history becomes head of Mozilla? Dude, show some heart-felt sensibility for the issue, tell everybody that either you've changed your views or that at least your professional actions in this regard will follow the broader community attitude, and then let's move ahead to other issues.