Problem is, someone who is posting radical opinions for the sake of shaking up the whole board and getting a lot of reactions is the definition of a troll (Not calling anyone out here.......) . And trolls tend to disrupt good conversation so there becomes a mentality to purge the forum of the troll so it can resume normally once more. After all, you don't see too much badgering between the normal P/R posters, do you?
How do you know his goal was just to shake things up? On a board where most of us are pretty moderate about something like gay marriage, it's refreshing to have a different perspective to look at, even if you or I consider it totally ridiculous. That doesn't mean the guy has nothing to offer, or that we have nothing to learn from him (potentially). It's too bad that anybody with a radical view of something gets beaten into submission by a bunch of equally useless emotional posts instead of being given the opportunity to reasonably defend himself.
Yeah, therein lies the problem. Having an outlandish opinion isn't trolling if you're intention is to promote and defend it. My take on trolling is that the intention is the key. If you're only looking to rile people up for LOLs, then it's problematic. I didn't get that out of him.
Epicview was a better example. I considered his posts to me no less misguided, but he was eager to defend them. Yet the same problem with him being dismissed as a troll every other post existed.
Furthermore, while I didn't feel interested in reading through 5 pages of silliness, I didn't see any baiting or personal attacks from him in what I did read. I thought his weightlifting comment to Icy was pretty amusing. The problem was that he wasn't in a position to pull off facetiousness, yet. I suspect that if I'd said that to Icy, he would have made a joke about it and all would have been kosher.