Matt Kennedy Banned From Twitter

Many of my readers know Matt Kennedy as the Rector of Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in upstate New York. Along with his wife, the almost famous author and blogger Anne, he is adept at sarcasm and very dry humor. More importantly, he is both measured and straight-spoken in what he says and writes.

But that is not good enough for Twitter. He is banned and is likely to remain so.  I will let Fr. Matt tell the story from his Facebook account:

Well, I've been suspended from Twitter for 12 hours. Remember the man posing as a woman and trying to force poor immigrant women working in spas to give him a "brazillian wax" treatment. 

Yep, that . . . whatever again.  

He tweeted that he had been victimized by women refusing to touch his genitals and I wrote the following under his tweet: "@trustednerd You are a man pretending to be a woman trying to force real women to touch your testicles. It is perverse and sickening. It has nothing to do with love. But you can be forgiven if you will forsake yourself and turn to Jesus who bled and died for sinners. He can heal you." And so, now I am suspended. So fascinating to see "progressives" defend, angrily I might add, an attempt by a man to legally force women to touch his reproductive organs. Here's the note from Twitter: "We've temporarily limited some of your account features. We have determined that this account violated the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for violating our rules against hateful conduct. You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease."

It’s not Matt Kennedy who is doing the harassing.  And to his credit, he is not backing down.

Update 1: They said I could lift the ban by removing the tweet or by appealing. I will not remove the tweet. So I appealed the banning. Here's what I wrote. They only gave me a limited number of characters: "a Canadian man is trying to legally force women to touch his genitals. I objected to this. I have no idea why this violates twitter standards." 

Let's see what happens.

Update 2: Here's what happened: 

"Thank you for your patience as we reviewed your appeal request for account, @lambeth98, regarding the following:

Matt Kennedy
@lambeth98
'@trustednerd You are a man pretending to be a woman trying to force real women to touch your testicles. It is perverse and sickening. It has nothing to do with love. But you can be forgiven if you will forsake yourself and turn to Jesus who bled and died for sinners. He can heal you."

Our support team has determined that a violation did take place, and therefore we will not overturn our decision.
You will not be able to access Twitter through your account due to violations of the Twitter Rules, specifically our rules around:
Violating our rules against hateful conduct

In order to restore account functionality, you can resolve the violations by logging into your account and completing the on-screen instructions."

Which are….

"By clicking the above button, you are removing the content of your Tweet and forgoing the option to appeal this violation. Please note that the original content will be replaced with a notice stating your Tweet is no longer available because it violated the Twitter Rules."

Now in case you do not already know that Fr. Matt is not one to back down, his conclusion is:

Yeah, no, that's not going to happen. 

I will update if anything new happens. But knowing Fr. Matt’s backbone and Twitter tyranny, I am not expecting any change.