Debbie Does Dawg (Wrong)

One of the problems with being a professional moralizer, an arbiter of all things right and wrong, is that people expect you to model the exemplary life that you demand of others. Deborah Gyapong's explicitly social conservative, Christian site is marked by a goodly share of Grundyish finger-wagging. Now it's my turn to wag right back.

I first met Deborah at the Warman v. Lemire hearing in Ottawa this past March 25th. She seemed congenial enough at the time. She put up a post at her place about the adventure, to which I responded civilly enough. The post was "moderated" out of existence. Ditto a second one.

I don't have much of a difficulty with that. Some prefer their fugitive and cloistered virtue, practised in their hermetically sealed echo-chambers. I let it go, and that was that--until last week, when I published a post celebrating Dr. Henry Morgentaler's Order of Canada award. She ran a post responding to mine, linking to it, and she posted a version of it at my place, to which I responded.

I couldn't help observing at the outset that she showed a certain chutzpah by posting a long comment at my site when she had deleted all the comments I had sent her way. She answered: "I don't recall ever getting a comment from you on my blog. My comments are moderated and I don't always check to see which ones are pending as I don't get a lot of comments in the first place."

OK, I thought. A rather confusing answer, to put it mildly, but no problem. Out of curiosity, though, I checked to see if she had received any comments on her recent post. And indeed she had: two individuals, too benighted to follow the link she had provided, were whining that I had deleted her message. I sent a comment to clear that up.

This morning, two people left notes at my place, complaining that I had deep-sixed her comment. It may well have been the same unfortunate two, since their complaints showed up on other threads. But my clarification, in any case, has not appeared at her joint.

Now, this doesn't really add up, does it? She moderates her comments. She lets two through that are clearly misinformed, and not only does she do nothing to clear up the confusion, she refuses to print a comment of mine that does just that.

I take back "chutzpah." One only uses that word when one wants to convey a kind of implicit admiration. Under the circumstances, that would hardly seem appropriate.