February 8, 2007

Great News for GOP: "Pandagon" Dragon Not Fired After All!

With an abrupt burst of partisan pugnaciousness, John Edwards has decided to give his stamp of approval to a pair of obscene, anti-Catholic hatemongers as his official campaign bloggers, even as he says he was "offended" by their anti-Church diatribes.

Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon and Melissa McEwen of Shakespeare's Sister both have a history of hysterical "Christofascist" bashing, generally using four-letter words and not particularly distinguishing between extremist and mainstream Christians (especially Catholics -- their joint bête noir). Yesterday, the word on the street was that Edwards was dropping them; but today, he reversed course and said they will stay:

"I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word," Edwards said.

So when Marcotte wrote this:

Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.

...It was just in a spirit of friendly joshing; she had no intention of maligning anyone's faith. Just as when she uses the term "godbag," coined by somebody named "Twisty." Marcotte lovingly quotes (but does not link) "Twisty's" derivation of this word:

A godbag, if you will permit me the impropriety of quoting from my own rather extensive body of work on the subject, is “a bag full of hate and self-loathing wearing stage makeup that makes it look like a televangelist.” The suffix “-bag” alludes, not to a douche or to a woman whose countenance does not conform to patriarchal beauty standards, but to a “sack” or other sort of carryall.

Well, we're certainly reassured that "godbag" is not derived from "douchbag," though this entire post is Marcotte's paean to the latter as a generic term for what she also calls "anti-feminists" -- which evidently means anyone, male or female, who doesn't support the entire panoply of NOW and NARAL positions on abortion, same-sex marriage, the radical gay agenda, the Boy Scouts, the Catholic Church, contraception, and the Republican Party.

And the following is simply meant as a friendly but tough-love encouragement to the Church to be more compassionate towards those women who want abortions, no matter how late in the pregnancy:

And, needless to say, the Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to bear more tithing Catholics.

And this bit here is just sober analysis of the Democrats' inability to pick up any substantial numbers of believing Christians in the 2006 election -- for which Marcotte appears grateful:

It’s tempting to believe that all the Democrats need to do is pander shamelessly about god and Jesus in order to wow over some evangelicals that currently vote Republican. I think it’s easy for us to believe this because when we look at the Shrub blather on about god and Jeebus [sic], we know he’s full of ****. Sure, he may believe he’s a Christian, but his faith is obviously shallow. But a certain segment of fundies eat it up, so it’s easy to believe that if we started pandering, they’d eat that up too. [Obscenity censored. -- the Mgt.]

But we’ve got it backwards. Bush doesn’t pander to the Bible thumpers to attract their votes so much as to give them something to reassure themselves that the issues that they’re voting on are the correct ones for Christians. He’s telling them what they want to hear, which is that they can still feel like good Christians while supporting war-mongering, poverty-punishing Republicans. There’s a subtle but crucial difference here. The thumpers already have the desire to vote based on homophobia or sexism or racism, and Bush just gives them the excuse. They don’t need god-pandering from the Democrats, because they didn’t want to vote for them anway.

(For those who don't know, "Jeebus" is the derisive, anti-Christian, nutroots term for Jesus, intending to make Jesus Christ sound like Cletus, the slack-jawed yokel from the Simpsons... which, incidentally, is pretty much how people in Pandagon's and Shakespeare's Sister's camp view anyone who believes in either Jesus or God.

But Marcotte is an honorable woman; so are they all, all honorable women. And certainly, she would never malign anyone's faith in Jeebus!

McEwen isn't quite so virulent (or amusing) as Marcotte, but she has her days; this was posted on April 2nd, 2005 -- the day Pope John Paul II died:

Today, President Bush called the Pope a “champion of human dignity,” and if you were poor, suffering under Soviet tyranny in Eastern Europe, or facing the death penalty, you’d probably agree. But if you were gay, or a victim of a priest who sexually assaulted you, or a woman who wanted to be a good Catholic and leave an unhappy marriage or have a career that wasn’t interrupted repeatedly by childbirth, or a priest wrestling with celibacy, or a pregnant victim of rape or incest, you’d probably disagree, because the Pope didn’t particularly care about your dignity, your needs, or the realities of your life. The same, of course, can be said for Bush—and then some—so it’s no wonder he views the Pope that way.

Bashing the pope isn't the same as bashing the Church, but it comes uncomfortably close... particularly since, in this case, McEwen wasn't bashing John Paul for falling short of Church doctrine but instead for following Church doctrine on homosexuality, divorce, birth control, priestly celebacy, and abortion.

The only legitimate charge she levels, in the sense that a believing Catholic would mean by "legitimate," is that Pope John Paul II did not do enough about priests who had sex with parishoners: in the huge majority of cases, we mean normal, consentual gay sex with teenaged (and often adult) males, though of course there were also out-and-out child molesters among the priesthood, such as John Geoghan and the Irish priest cases: Brendan Smyth, Jim Grennan, and Sean Fortune. (However, the evidence indicates no greater percent of Catholic priests who are child molesters than one finds among Protestant ministers, rabbis, imams, or secular school teachers.)

But even here, the accusation that John Paul "didn't particularly care" about such sexual assaults as Geoghan perpetrated is rather bizarre; at worst, one could say that John Paul was insufficiently proactive in rooting out such priests. But the "dance of the molesters," shunting pedophile priests from one parish to another, was decided at a much lower level than the Holy See. Throwing this wad of offal at John Paul's head -- the very day he died -- betokens more than a casual level of Church hatred.

The bloggers, however, had inarguable refutations of any such inferences, as quoted in the Fox News piece above:

"It has never been my intention to disparage people's individual faith, and I'm sorry if my words were taken in that way," McEwen's statement said.

Marcotte's statement said her writings on religion on her blog, Pandagon, are generally satirical criticisms of public policies and politics.

"My intention is never to offend anyone for his or her personal beliefs, and I am sorry if anyone was personally offended by writings meant only as criticisms of public politics," Marcotte said. "Freedom of religion and freedom of expression are central rights, and the sum of my personal writings is a testament to this fact."

Well, all right then! After all, who wouldn't be satisfied by an I'm sorry if you were too stupid to understand what I was trying to say apology?

Candidate Edwards assures us (in a written statement, taking no questions, having already gone to the mattresses) that he doesn't share these sentiments:

"The tone and the sentiment of some of Amanda Marcotte's and Melissa McEwen's posts personally offended me," Edwards' statement read. "It's not how I talk to people, and it's not how I expect the people who work for me to talk to people. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that kind of intolerant language will not be permitted from anyone on my campaign, whether it's intended as satire, humor or anything else."

But of course, he hired them after they made those posts; and he rehired them after those posts were specifically brought to his attention. So it's safe to say, at the very least, that Edwards has no problem with those posts being part of the public face of the John Edwards presidential campaign.

The most interesting question to me is whether even now, Former Sen. John Edwards has troubled to read the entire history of posts these two have made bashing Catholics, Cristofascists, Jeebus-worshippers, godbags, douchebags, and the other endearing terms they collective have for those who believe in God. Is he clueless? Did he dismiss the allegations out of hand as "swift-boating" and not even bother perusing Pandagon or Shakespeare's Sister? Does he simply not care what godbags think or how they might vote?

Did he read this one, for example?

I suspect Pope Ratz will give into the urge eventually to come out and say there’s no limbo and unbaptized babies go straight to hell. He can’t help it; he’s just a dictator like that. Hey, fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, the Pope’s gotta tell women who give birth to stillborns that their babies are cast into Satan’s maw. The alternative is to let Catholic women who get abortions feel that it’ll all work out in the end, which is just not doable, due to that Jesus-like compassion the Pope is so fond of. Still, it’s going to be bad PR for the church, so you can sort of see why the Pope is dragging ass.

Or worse -- does Edwards believe that most Americans actually agree with these anti-Catholic, anti-Christian sentiments? Does Edwards think that rehiring -- or at least unfiring -- Marcotte and McEwen will gain him brownie points with the American voter? Hey, he's standing up for their constitutional right to free speech -- and their constitutional right to have that speech amplified by a Democratic presidential campaign.

For that matter, an awful lot of voters would be utterly appalled by the sheer rate of vulgarities and obscenities per minute spewed by both these bloggers -- behavior that may be common (or at least tolerated) in the blogosphere (not everywhere in the 'sphere, however), or among some subcultures in America, but which is certainly not commonplace among middle-income, white-collar Americans of all races, religions, and both genders... who make up the bulk of the American electorate.

I certainly don't know how the Edwardses speak at home, but perhaps John Edwards is blissfully unaware that most of us don't use the f-bomb as a placeholding grunt; we use "um" or "er," not m**********r.

There are times I almost begin to believe that the reality-based community is somewhat unreal in its perceptions of real America.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, February 8, 2007, at the time of 3:44 PM

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