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Comment by ebiester | Hacker News Reader

I believe it'd be an interesting addition.

However, before you do, ask yourself: would you have the same opinion if you were gay and 15 years old in a fundamentalist family? In a middle eastern country? If you were transgendered but only in the beginning stages of transitioning? If you were polygamous in a community that disapproved?

How about if you were conservative in a liberal university?

How about talking about how you had an abortion? That's an important view, with policy implications, but you never know who would fire you if they knew.

Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?

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> Should everyone with non-normative views be forced into silence?

Absolutely not, and I agree with you. But help me out - isn't the root cause of all the examples you list a lack of information? Case in point of many: don't people in general become less bigoted the more educated they become?

Call me a naive idealist, but I wonder if the information barriers erected by people to protect themselves, are, on a wider scale, actually what keeps bigotry and hatred alive?

Zuckerberg isn't a saint, so I'm not suggesting that there is any altruistic motive behind his moves. I'm just questioning if greater transparency is inherently a bad thing.

That's how I live my life. I also have white male privilege and a wonderful family who embraced me coming out and the ability to choose my employers due to my skills as a developer. That's why I live out of the closet, precisely for the reasons you mention.

That doesn't hold for a kid in a religious household, the same exact kid who needs to find a community in which she or he can be heard. It was that anonymous community that allowed me to find the resources I needed.

Now, to be fair, the LGBT community is largely going to know better than to force people to name themselves, and the blogger always holds the choice. I'm more concerned about the overarching issue. I'm concerned about governments forcing their citizens to blog and comment using their own names. And Facebook's move is exactly the type of thing that will give them ideas.

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