Because pussies are SCARY — unless they’re attached to nice, safe GLBT-TSTV-TPONMKBR549{?# lesbians who will never harm them? Because, as the “teabagees,” their mouths are already full? Because they are pussies, filled with the sort of self-loathing that must inevitably accompany the contradictory embrace of an ideology that exists only to enslave, while they yammer nonsensically about freedom?

Whatever it is, that title was just too good not to swipe, although there’s a serious aspect to the story:

Commenter Pope Jimbo points us to a censorship* controversy at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Director** of social media Kurt Greenbaum recently ran a Friday thumbsucker asking commenters to name the “strangest things” they had ever eaten. Greenbaum’s narrative:

Then, while I was in our 10 a.m. news meeting, someone posted in reply a single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy. It was there only a minute before a colleague deleted it.

A few minutes later, the same guy posted the same single-word comment again.

Through the power of advanced internet technologies, Greenbaum discovered the commenter’s IP address and sent it to the commenter’s employer, a local school. Greenbaum again: “Using the time-frame of the comments, our website location and the IP addresses in the WordPress e-mail, [the school's IT person] tracked it back to a specific computer. The headmaster confronted the employee, who resigned on the spot.”

So they went and got somebody’s livelihood taken away because he was so vulgar as to use a common slang word for “vagina,” (HATE SPEECH) did they? Wow, how compassionate; how tolerant; how, umm, broad-minded (okay, sorry – but just go ahead and try to get me fired for it; I dares ya). The PD commenters ain’t having any:

Dr. De-bunk has made an excellent point Kurt. YOU at the PD have chuckled as you use (and print) the word “tea-baggers” to describe conservative activists voicing their opinions. You and all your sophomoric liberal chums at the PD know exactly what that word means yet you still print it. Why don’t you explain to some of your older readers (that maybe aren’t as hip as the majority of your dwindling readers) in graphic detail exactly what a tea-bagger is.

Cavanaugh spends the rest of the post having way too much fun with the whole controversy — which is pretty easy when the object of your mockery is a class of priggish PC scolds famous for having no facility for humor at all — even the coarser, more adolescent genres.

Not me though, Jack. Coarse and adolescent are my specialty when it comes to humor. And the Reason commentariat, to their credit and my amusement, take the ball and run with it. Well, except for Vulgarity-hating guy:

Actually, just saying “penis” or “vagina” doesn’t bother me that much; they’re just kind of cold and clinical terms and therefore don’t fit very well into a romantic conversation. You mostly only hear them used in sex education classes and at the doctor’s office.

As for vulgar slang, what’s wrong with it is that it tends to suggest sex is something dirty or disgusting, which it ought not to be when done right.

Au contraire, mon frere. You got it exactly backwards there, bub.

Update! Wow. Greenbaum’s really getting his. And I do not mean…oh, never mind.