If it is his real opinion, everybody else should respect that, like everybody wants his opinion respected by others.

This is the part of your statement I completely disagree with. We all have respected his arguments on gun control, religion, etc. But when he crosses into religious and ethnic slurs and personal attacks, it's no longer about an open debate of ideas, it's about attacking cultures, races, and individual BBS members. That type of thing destroys entire conversations and helps nobody learn anything about another's opinions.

See, in your illustration of the typical lifetime of a [censored]-infested thread, you forgot one thing. If he doesn't draw a reaction, he keeps reeling off more and more inflammatory comments until someone snaps. Once the thread is poisoned with responses to his trolling, he loses interest and moves on.

For instance, we have had good political debates in some of the threads here recently completely derailed by this. You say you laugh at it and ignore it, but his comments are so inflammatory that they are going to draw a response from someone. Even if 99% of people do their best to ignore him, someone is going to respond, and that's all it takes for it to mushroom out of control. Now he has what he wants, at which point he closes his browser window and, more than likely, tries to use the same attention-getting tactics on his mommy and daddy.

He sees this somehow as his job on the BBS, and the majority opinion is that all he's doing is degrading the quality of the conversation, not increasing it. In the past, when he's offered logical opinions based on an occasional fact or two, he's gotten a very good response. When he's throwing out words like "sandniggers" and "ragheads" (among other followups) I feel it's going too far, and a majority of the BBS agrees. Maybe you're okay with it, and get a chuckle out of it, but he's attacking a resource (this forum) that a lot of us really enjoy, and that's why we get pissed off.