Yeah, I never delete comments just for having opposing opinions either. However, sometimes those people who have different opinions than me decide to be childish gits about it and call names in the same breath that they express their opinion. When they do that, that puts me in a difficult situation - to recognize their right to freedom of speech (because if they deleted my comment just for having an opposing opinion, I’d think that unfair), or to not be insulted mindlessly on my own website. Fortunately I’ve grown a bit of a thicker skin, so I can let childish insults go a little better than some percent of younger site owners. I find it very difficult to draw the line between when they’re saying something different and just being stupid when insults or namecalling are found in their comment.

Exactly. I guess that’s what I’m getting at, but for me it’s more of a childish, “If you’ve apologized and don’t want to look a right moron anymore, I’ll delete your mean and nasty comment. However, if you’re still a jerk, I’ll leave it up there and poke fun at you.” I guess that’s how a lot of site owners would react, but I still feel rather childish for feeling that way about situations like that.

I always thought that way too. Sites with overly aggressive, “You submit this and I can say it’s on my site I own the rights to it” TOS’s were full of bull. They’re still my words, even if I loaned them to the site owner. It’s like a research paper. Just because you incorporate someone else’s idea into your own hypothesis doesn’t make it yours. You gotta give credit where credit is due.

Oh, and btw, I edited your comment. You had the small tag in code tags, but everything on this site between code tags gets automatically escaped, so it was displaying like < small > rather than like <small>. It was essentially being double-escaped. (I should probably note that everything between code tags is auto-escaped in the magic WP-generated XHTML tags paragraph, huh?)

Commenters own their words to a certain extent. It’s kind of like school. You have your rights, but they (teachers) are allowed to infringe on some of them. If a commenter really wanted their comment revoked from my site, I would remove it if they had a good reason. I feel, though, that if I don’t want to remove it, than I shouldn’t necessarily have to. The commenter owns their words, but you own the space it’s being displayed on.