Michael P. O'Connor

I have been doing some thinking about groups and politics. I have been thinking about this since I started to look into the biking “community” in Pittsburgh. I have found that this so called community is very intolerant of any one that holds any political view that is not their own. I tried to ignore the politics of the other cyclists in Pittsburgh. But I found it very hard to ignore, since at the places they run they have anti-republican posters. They also make all their events political in nature, even if it is simply a bike ride, they will find a way to put a political spin on it. The final straw was they have been harassing me and a few of my friends at our pro-life rallies. I know that they have the right to make their statements but they are trying to push us off the side walk and into the road, where we can not be legally while protesting ourselves, so they are in a sense violating our free speech. At this point I have come to the conclusion, that I have found the the cycling community, and I do not want to be part of it. A good number of people in the biking “community” has also made it clear to me that I as a conservative am not welcome around them at all.
As to other groups I belong to. The first group I am going to explore is wplug I know that most computer people are liberal leaning, but at wplug I have not had a problem of me being discriminated against or made fun of for being a conservative. For the most part the people at wplug do not really care what the other people’s political views are. A few people there (I included) have talked politics, even though we did not agree. It was still civil, which I can say is more then the cycling people in Pittsburgh. For the most part I will say that on the whole wplug has good people.

The next group is my church (First Trinity), and politics do not enter into it. At church the only thing that is at issues is the Christian (Lutheran, LCMS) faith.
I think that covers the groups I am a member of right now. And even where I work which is academia which is historically very liberal, there has not been any problems for me as a conservative, I just for the most part keep to my small work group, and do not go to far out of it, and things for the most part have been fine. In fact I don’t even think that they really care about my politics there, which is a good thing, since the work place should be a place that is free of politics (unless you work for a political organization.)
I wonder if there is another set of cyclists in the Pittsburgh area that are either, conservative, or less confrontational about politics.