Hello there ChesterBelloc,
Thanks for your question- we’re happy to try and explain our reasoning here. The thread in question, was, for the most part, a civil discussion about a contentious subject- something we’d have no issue with so long as it was within our Talk Guidelines. Unfortunately, though, it quickly became derailed by an extremely offensive poster, who is now banned from the site.
As well as that, we received a lot of reports from MNers who found the thread quite distressing, and felt that many of the posts were deliberately inflammatory. We certainly don’t want a situation where MNers who may have been through such a traumatic experience feel the need to join a thread to justify their decisions- which we could see was happening.
Removing very busy threads is not a decision we take lightly, but we do like to be guided by our users here, and judging by the large number of reports, we felt leaving the thread to stand would only continue to cause distress, and that’s not what we’re about.