Au contraire, mon frère.
In private conversations with the mods I've resisted banning anyone in general and PapaG in particular. Perhaps they'll vouch for me.
In any case, since he was perma-banned, the quality of the posting and the treatment of people by one another seems to have been much better. People who weren't posting began posting again. We have plenty of PM type feedback thanking us for making the board more fun to read.
We excuse a lot of heated dialog in the OT section because the topics are religion and politics a lot - things you're not supposed to discuss at the dinner table, so they say.
IMO, we should never be about looking for reasons to ban anyone. But when someone is making people who are loyal to this place miserable, we have to think about taking action.
He came back under a new user name and we decided to see if he might change his ways. It wasn't about anything specifically that he posted this time, it was that he was on a short leash and he was in the midst of multiple ongoing flame fests and enough is enough.
We absolutely plan to be aggressive about enforcing the ban this time. No more coming back under new user names.