You didn't ask, but my personal view is that this topic has outlived its usefulness on SCREEN-L, and should be left alone to die a slow, lingering death. Now if we're talking about media portrayal of such domestic violence, than that's different. But as far as the small group which insists on fanning the flames with their total lack of respect for others in this childish game of getting in the last word, I'd let them 'win' and drop it. If you're concerned with answering in order to enlighten people's minds and further intellectual discourse, I think that we are past that, and anybody who cares about such collegial debate is probably deleting posts about this topic (or in Ms. McKee's case signing off). Think about the depth of thinking displayed by some on SCREEN-L the past couple of weeks; is _any_ amount of reasoning/facts/logic going to persuade them? I think not. If you want to respond to immature posts to show that you haven't backed down, that they're small-minded, etc., I'd agree w/ Mr. Pryluck's recent classy post: ignore them. Perhaps post a brief message saying something to the effect that 'as much good as is going to come from this discussion has come out of it, and you're taking a pass on the rest' would do it. Then after a few more people followed suit, we'd have nothing but a few antagonists spewing venom at each other about how much they miss baiting the rest of the list, and we could all move on to new topics peacefully. Chris Castellanos [log in to unmask]