Our policies

The rules here are mostly common-sense but common sense isn't always so common, so we thought we should spell them out.

Privacy

We will not sell, rent, or otherwise share your account information with anyone. Period.

Etiquette

We welcome dissent and passionate debate and so we need to create the kind of environment where that can occur safely. That means no personal attacks. "I think that's a ridiculous idea because ..." is much more effective than "You'd have to be a real idiot to think that ..."

Images

It's hard to talk about sex without talking about sexual images, and it's hard to talk about sexual images without sometimes using them as illustrations. This is primarily an information and discussion site, not primarily an entertainment site, but either way there will be times when explicit imagery may be appropriate. Our policy is that graphic sexual images be kept off the front page of the site.

Other than small avatars for users, for now we will only host images that are submitted by editors or administrators on this site. (This may change in the future.) There are lots of ways to link to images elsewhere, though, and we encourage you to use them when they help you make your point.

If you have a blog on this site and you are going to link to an explicit image in a post, please make sure that you do so "after the break" so it doesn't show up on the front page. And it might be nice to indicate to readers what's coming up if they read more. We much prefer informed decision making over any kind of censorship.

Age and Access Restrictions Sex In The Public Square is dedicated to providing information and education about sexuality, and to providing an opportunity for a free and open exchange about these issues. We believe that information and education should be available to everyone, not restricted by law or by the faith of others. We do, however, want to facilitate parents' ability to make informed choices about what their children see on the Internet, and so we label our content with ICRA labels approved by the Family Online Safety Institute so that it can be filtered using parental controls software. To view our label, click here.

Legal uses only
We are hosted by HostDiscovery and their Acceptable Use Policy forbids the use of their servers for illegal purposes. That means no harassment, no child pornography, no pirated or otherwise stolen material, no malware or spamming or hacking or otherwise destructive behavior. You can see their policy here. Basically, you are forbidden to use our site to break the law unless we ask you to engage in some kind of civil disobedience :)