Once, when I was a lad, I was verbally assaulted on the streets of New York by a paranoid schizophrenic. This raving lunatic came at me waving his hands wildly in the air with spittle and shrill curses spewing from his mouth in equal measure. I had been walking along lost in my own meditations and was so startled by the attack that for a moment, I couldn’t process it. I wondered: had I unwittingly done something wrong? It took me a moment to understand that, no, it had nothing to do with me, really. I had simply violated the borders of the poor fellow’s internal world. The abuse was, in some sense, his way of defending his fantasies from the threat of my reality.

Arguing with a leftist is something like that. Used to civilized debate with liberals and conservatives alike, you can’t quite take in what’s happening at first. Your ideas and observations are met with screeching venomous diatribes and personal attacks and you think, oh my goodness, have I said something untoward? It takes a moment before you realize, no, not at all. You have simply disturbed a cherished fantasy world and the resultant rage is a form of recognition that your ideas, if not always right, at least relate to reality and thus threaten to undermine the leftist’s chimerical sense of personal virtue.

Having nary a philosophical leg to stand on, the arguing leftist, to borrow a phrase from Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, “wants to win by making you weaker instead of making himself stronger.” So, instead of facts and observations to support his side, it’s all ad hominem attacks meant to shame, frighten or delegitimize you. We’re all wearily familiar with their insults by now: you’re a racist, you’re a sexist, you’re homophobe, you’re a fascist. A man can’t support his nation’s war effort because he’s not a veteran. A woman can’t write in favor of at-home Moms because then she’s not an at-home Mom at all but a professional journalist. And heaven forfend you should point out that certain feminists are just shrews with a fancy philosophical excuse—then they unleash the worst insult they can think of: you must be gay. And all of this is usually accompanied by a shrill steady blast of four letter words and other verbal savagery—anything to scare away nasty reality and keep their discredited worldview intact.

Last week, my Pajamas Express blog suffered an onslaught by these leftist haters. As far as I can tell, they were spurred on by someone named Glenn Greenwald, whom I don’t know, but who seems to have inspired them with a nonsensical personal attack of his own and then sent them forth like the Wicked Witch dispatching her flying monkeys. Now, my policy has always been to allow all comments on my site. I enjoy the debate, occasionally learn from it and frequently get a laugh from some hostile wit who lands a good one on me.

So at first I shrugged off the Attack of the Leftist Hate Monkeys. As a result, they were allowed to darken the atmosphere for other readers and commenters and detract from the generally free and jovial bellicosity of online discussion. Thus, after a weekend of meditatively beating my wife, relaxing around the men’s room glory hole and skewering babies to watch them writhe and die, I’ve decided I’ll ever-so-slightly modify my policy. All opinions – by which I mean ALL opinions – remain welcome. Snarkiness, sarcasm, satire, pointed wit, commonplace nastiness will still make the grade. Even low-level name-calling is all right if it applies. Nothing wrong with the occasional “boor” or “knucklehead.” But cursing, strangled cries of hate-filled rage, disturbing personal attacks that reveal more about the attacker’s sick mind than we want to know—they’re gone. Send that stuff to my mailbox through my personal website. You can be sure I’ll give it the consideration it deserves.

Oh, and one more thing – and this, I’m sorry to say, goes for both sides – no more using homosexuality as a pejorative per se: calling Greenwald a fairy or suggesting I’m gay as if that were a bad thing. I’ve lived my life in the arts. Gay people have been respected colleagues and beloved friends for as long as I can remember. Calling me gay doesn’t insult me (if I were gay I would live that life with as much joy and hilarity as I’ve lived out my destiny as a macho love machine), but it does reduce a mode of human being to a form of invective. If you want to make a reasoned argument that homosexuality is some kind of sin or deficiency, feel free. If it’s just name-calling, bugger, as it were, off.

So that’s it. If I interest you, provoke you, anger you, delight you, I’m thrilled you’re here. But if in the light of my luminous presence you’re revealed to be nothing but a seething tar pit of rage and vileness, stick with Greenwald. I’m sure he’ll make you feel right at home.