I feel like the avatars should stay. My reasoning: my avatar says Hate Has No Home Here.
I really wish it was always an easy, clearly demarcated situation where anybody would look at a piece of reported content and say either:
1) "Clearly that's political"
2) "Clearly that's not political"
... unfortunately there are thousands of items reported that are in a very VERY gray area between those two extremes.
What one person feels is "good and right", another person feels it's "bad and wrong". It's basically the reason why the peeps (the US particularly) is in so much turmoil. Nobody can agree on what's "right or wrong", just like a lot of our members will question the items we determine are "politically charged".
It's these gray-area cases where our AMAZING staff will do the best they can to review, discuss, and decide which items are / are not appropriate for our community.
NOTE: We do not "choose sides". Often there are times where one or more of our moderators actually
agree (sometimes very strongly) with an item they are removing. It's not about "right vs. wrong", but about avoiding topics that we know are currently very charged and create debate... and those specific items probably will change over time. Thank goodness we have such an amazing team of moderators that work hard to put their own biases aside and do what is best for our wonderful community!