Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

News is out this morning that the Amanda Marcote, the second of the two controversial bloggers who were hired on by John Edwards, submitted her resignation this morning. I’ve wanted to write about this issue, but wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it.

When the story first broke, I was a bit reluctant to even take it seriously. Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, seems to find anti-Catholicism eveywhere, it’s a little hard to take that much crying wolf. (By the way, his targets are not just liberals, he’s taken the various political figures who have genuflected at Bob Jones University to task as well.) He’s almost like an Irish-Catholic version of Chris Rock’s character Nat X.

I also kept in mind that I got an e-mail from a local claiming to be in his organization that claimed that the title of my blog was an anti-Catholic slur, and thus my blog was anti-Catholic.

Not only did that individual miscast the history of the phrase (he claimed it was first used against Al Smith), but he obviously doesn’t read the blog too carefully. I told Tony Cani about this and he said, “but you are the only guy I know that blogs about saints.” I wrote back to the guy and explained myself. I decided not to play more Catholic than thou so I didn’t tell him that since that week was the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe, I had actually been to church a couple of times that week. I haven’t heard from the guy since.

I digress. Anyway, I have learned to take anything from Donohue and his group with a grain of salt. However, I went ahead and read the passages that so aggrieved him.  As a Catholic, I found them offensive. The two of them crossed that line from criticizing the Church’s political positions, always fair game, to deliberately using language designed to offend believers, even casting all Christians as idiots. I don’t understand why you would go out of your way to tick people off in some attempt to be edgy, and then say, gosh, I didn’t know you would be all offended.

Donohue, however, is the wrong guy to be complaining about this. The guy’s anti-Semetic rants make him a poor spokesman for religious tolerance and civil discussion. That goes double for Michelle Malkin, who is affiliated with many right wing blogs that are no less offensive than anything that these two have done.

Also, whatever they wrote, no matter how offensive to one’s faith, does not in anyway justify the mounds of hate mail, some encouraged by the right wing blogs, that the two of them have recieved. Marcotte, posted some of the hate mail on her site. Just like Kyrsten Sinema’s recent e-mails, Marcotte’s hate mail contains rape threats. Is this a trend?

Even given all of this, I think there is a lesson here for us missivists on this side of the aisle. Many of us try to be provocative, and that borders on offensive sometimes. Even though we are unconstrained by the rules and norms of journalism, that still doesn’t keep us from being responsible for what we say.

As much as we would all like to blame the right wing noise machine for this, there would have been no “there there” if they hadn’t given plenty of material to the bozos. If for no other reason, they should have been let go for the lack of judgement that they exhibited after they were hired. One of these bloggers, when given a reprieve from Edwards, decided to go off and write further offensive comments, when she knew that people were looking for them. Edwards could explain away stuff written before they were hired, but not while they were on his payroll. Words matter, that is why we do this.