Charles, #1 most of what I post are articles from Mormon sources; and those who are provoked are the people who are generally fine & dandy (to a certain degree) with Mormonism. (That's what makes this all so ironic)
#2...99% of the articles I post aren't written by me.
#3...People can react negatively all they want to the articles; it's when they engage in ad hominens that they set a bad tone for the world to see.
#4...Truth isn't subject to a provocation vote. (Otherwise, Jesus wouldn't have spoken so negatively of the legalists of that time -- the Pharisees)
As I said, you should post what you want; I didn’t say you wrote what you post, but you do choose what you post. I could find lots of article to post that would NOT be my words, but would get lots of conservatives mad.
Sometimes people try to avoid angering others by posting “barf alert” on their posts, to indicate a disagreement with the premise of an article; otherwise, the tendency is to believe the posters are in agreement with the excerpt of an article. (On the other hand, I never use parenthetical title modifiers, and trust that freepers will understand that what I post is someone else’s writing, and I will express my own opinion in the body of the thread).
Nice thing about a public forum, is everybody has a chance to give their own reactions to an article. In fact, I signed up for FR precisely to see how other conservatives were dealing with the news of the day. I had just started writing opinion columns for a local newspaper, and wanted to see what arguments worked, and which fell flat. It was a tremendous resource.
It is ironic that a poster who expresses complete disdain for mormons appeals to their authority when others attack mormon writers. On the merits, you have a valid point, except that Mormons are not monolithic, (see Harry Reid), and newspapers and the journolist profession is a haven for liberals, so it is not at all surprising that even a mormon-run newspaper would attract the most liberal of the faith, and would unfairly attack republicans.
Maybe if you go back and read the comments, you’ll find that the harsh negative reaction you perceive was for the authors falsely smearing the GOP for something they didn’t do and had no control over. In a conservative forum, you should expect that to be a primary focus, even if what you wanted was to attack the mormon faith and to get a chance to attack fellow freepers for not showing “sufficient deference” to the victims of some crime (which, sorry to say, sound so much like what liberals do whenever there is some tragedy, attack conservatives for not respecting victims, while the liberals use the same tragedy to score political points.
In this case, while you ask what you seem to treat as mormon sympathisers to “have respect” for the victims, and to think of them first, you are using their tragedy NOT to evoke sympathy and prayers for them, but to attack the mormon faith and politicians who hold to that faith — in other words, you attack other freepers for disliking a thread where you exploit rape victims to score your political and religious points.
I object to that when it’s the anti-Catholic posters using individual bad acts by priests to trash their faith. It’s not surprising that some react negatively to your exploitation here.