Personally, I do care. As an individual, my feelings are hurt by that homenode. And I care, even though I am not American, for the same reason I cared and I felt hurt when I saw two planes smashed to NY twin towers, because I am a human being.

As a member of the open source community, though, I think that freedom of speech must be defended.

However, another principle that I try to follow is that my rights cease where your rights begin.
It is my right to drive on the road, but since it is your right to cross the same road, I should not run you over.
I have the right to express myself. I don't feel that my right implies offending other people for their belonging to one nation, ethnic group, religion, football team, you name it.
I feel, instead, that I have the right to stay in a public place without being addressed as "s*head" or similar things.

By joining perlmonks, I expected to find a technical forum where to express and exchange technical information, without any political, religious, ethnic or national biase.

I agree that censoring is a bad thing, but I am sure that sticking to a policy is not censoring. And the policy is "Talk about Perl, have fun". I fail to see how "Feel free of offending other people" could be rightfully added to the PerlMonks policy.
I wonder what would happen if I replaced the picture in my homenode with something really, really out of order, such as an explicit pornographic picture or a scene from an autopsy, and I filled my node of insults directed to specific individuals in this Monastery.
Don't read me wrong. Doing such a thing would be the last of my intentions, but just for the sake of argument let's assume that I went nuts and I did it.
What would the community do? What would be the feeling of those dozens of people explicitly insulted in my node? And what about fearing the wrath of the law, if my picture contents were declared contrary to moral and fall under an international investigation?
(No I did not write that anonymous message about the FBI, but I understand its implications. In some countries, I mean civilized ones, the ISP are responsible if the contents of their sites are against the law, i.e. if they are obscene or diffamatory.)

Think about it.

Freedom of speech is OK. But rational people must understand their limits. And respect them.

And talking about limits, we already have some. If I write a node asking advice on how to make a null modem cable, the NodeReaper will delete it. So what happened to my freedom of speech in this case? Didn't I have the right to ask whatever I wanted? Not really. I should have respected the PM policy.
And what if I felt rejected, traumatized, biased, discriminated by the NodeReaper censorship? Too bad. It was my fault. I joined the Monastery and I did not play by the rules, so I must face the consequences.
So censoring null modem cables is OK, while censoring offensive behaviour is a no-no? I am not convinced.

It's a controversial matter. I don't know what it would be the best action to take. Personally, I don't think that respecting a few rules of civilized cohabitation should be seen as censorship. And I don't think anybody could accuse us of being repressive if we enforced a simple rule of decency.

At this point, somebody might feel that having the power of removing offensive contents could lead to true discrimination, and the next step would be that somebody's homenode will be cleared because the owner was using recursive regexes instead of module Recurse::Forever.
My idea in this respect is that I trust the community. If I found that I have joined a group of fanatic anti-recursive-subs or pro-closures-in-modules that will prosecute anything different from their creed, I would simply leave the group, because it was not what I wanted.
I know what I want. I know what I am now. I am a member of a community of very skilled Perl enthusiasts. The day that they will start excluding me because my scripts are using the wrong tab stop, or because I am listening to disreputable music, then I would look for something different. As it is today, I understand the rules, and I am playing them. If I make a mistake (and I have made a few :) I accept that the NodeReaper comes to bury the fruit of my Perl sins.
At the same time, I don't have any difficulty accepting to behave in a civilized manner and I don't think I am asking too much if I expect that the other Monks extend the same courtesy to me.

Back to my opening statement. I don't like that node. So what? You may say. I could just avoid it. Yes. True. But I feel concerned - not to say ashamed - as a member of the PM community towards a visitor who is coming to see the Monastery and stumbles into that node. Would he/she join after such brilliant presentation? What if the visitor is an employer who is reading a CV and sees a reference to PM and decides to have a look? What then? Should that Monk hide being a member of PM, because it could undermine the chances of getting a job? And what if it's your boss?

I leave my thoughts open. I understand and support the principle of preserving complete freedom, even though I am concerned about what would happen to my desire for peaceful cohabitation.

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