The Edwards bloggers

John Edwards is a candidate for president of the United States. What his staffers do and say presumably reflects who he is and what he believes. So I’m surprised their outrageous anti-Catholic blogging didn’t get more attention in the media.

However, I knew Diogenes would be on it.

Bloggers Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan have long luxuriated in anti-Catholic invective… Now that Marcotte and McEwan have been hired as staffers for John Edwards’s presidential campaign, their writings have become an embarrassment to his supporters — not that those supporters don’t share the convictions expressed, but the perfunctory apologies tendered in consequence of the outcry put the Edwards campaign “off message” for a day or two.

Did you even hear about it? Not many did. But Diogenes analyzes it.

Two aspects of the controversy stand out for your Uncle Di. First, the laughably supine harlotry of the prestige media in their coverage of the story. Below are the sole specimens of the bloggers’ bliggotry cited in yesterday’s New York Times article:

“In some of their online writings, Ms. Marcotte and Ms. McEwan used vulgar language to characterize religious conservatives and Roman Catholic teachings on birth control, homosexuality and the virgin birth.

“On her personal blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, Ms. McEwan had referred to conservative Christians as “Christofascists.” On the Pandagon blog site, Ms. Marcotte had said that the Catholic Church’s prohibition on the use of birth control forced women to bear “more tithing Catholics.”
True, of course, but benign to the point of distortion. It’s wryly amusing that the Times should adopt such Victorian primness toward piarum auribus offensiva when the party that stands to lose by accurate transcription are left-liberals.”

That’s bad enough, and the indictment speaks for itself. But…

The second and more intriguing aspect of the flap is the nature of Marcotte and McEwan’s anti-Catholicism. To call it “offensive” misses the point. It’s the hatred behind the offensiveness that’s the interesting phenomenon. After all, ridicule — even ridicule intended to offend — need not proceed from hatred. But Marcotte and McEwan’s does. Nor is their antipathy “anti-Catholicism” of the old fashioned tribal variety.

This evening on Fox News’ The Beltway Boys, Mort Kondracke concluded some coverage of this Edwards campaign offense by saying that if the offensive remarks were anti-Jewish, anti-homosexual, anti-black or just about any other group, the staffers would have been fired immediately. It seems, Kondracke said, that being anti-Catholic is still the only accepted bigotry.