@sk Jamie Varon: I support gay marriage, just not on Facebook

Dear Jamie,

Before I ask my question, let me preface it by saying this: I support gay marriage. I have lots of gay and lesbian friends. The problem, at least when it comes to Facebook, is that lots of my gay and lesbian friends are now constantly preaching about gay marriage or posting rants about homophobes. Actually, it's not really a problem; it's just irritating. I use Facebook to keep up with friends, not to read political polemics. I don't want to unfriend these people. I still like reading their (occasional) updates about their personal lives. I also don't feel I can say something to them directly — that would hurt their feelings. What should I do?

It's quite clear from your question that you do, in fact, fully support gay marriage. Why else would you want to unfriend people who are passionate about this cause and are speaking out against the injustice? It makes perfect sense that you would prefer to leave the do-gooding to your friends while you just read updates about how wasted your other friends got, or what level they reached on Modern Warfare 2.

I think you should e-mail your gay and lesbian friends and tell them that, although it's wonderful that they are so invested in the debate surrounding gay marriage, it would be nice if they could just, you know, tone it down a bit. Their political talk is just getting in the way of all the other important things people are doing on Facebook, like playing Farmville and tagging pictures of themselves while taking a shit. Once you send that e-mail, you'll be fine. No worries about seeing their updates anymore: They'll unfriend you before you even have a chance to unfriend them. Problem solved. Next!

Seriously: Just hide their stories from your news feed. Once you do that, you can occasionally search for them and see what they've been up to besides their political ranting. You won't be inundated with their updates, but you can still check up on them every once in a while by going directly to their profiles. That's a much better solution than unfriending them.