I posed a question in an update to a previous post but, failing to get an answer, thought it deserved elevation to its own.
There has been a running controversy about some statements Amanda Marcotte, John Edwards’ blogatrix, made on her personal site, Pandagon. Those statements have been well documented.
Over the last couple of days, though, her campaign cohort Melissa McEwan, a/k/a “Shakespeare’s Sister,” has been lumped into the discussion by the Catholic League, major media outlets, and the blogosphere. I’ve followed suit, discussing them as a unit, simply because of that discussion. Some readers, notably Cernig and Anderson, think this is unfair.
While I’ve seen lots of offensive quotes from Marcotte around the blogosphere since this controversy erupted, I haven’t seen a single one from McEwan cited. Is this a bizarre case of guilt-by-association, with John Edwards throwing her under the bus for expediency?
Your assignment, should you choose to accept it: Aside from simple uses of vulgar language, what has McEwan written that could be characterized as either anti-Catholic or that might otherwise have “personally offended” John Edwards? Please supply links if possible.
UPDATE: yetanotherjohn takes the challenge and offers up some excerpts. None, I think, are on par with the more outrageous Marcotte quotes that have been cited. The most problematic one is less so when taken in context:
This seems to be a particular, peculiar attribute of the American Right, not necessarily unique to them, but by them indisputably perfected. The Right is always being victimized, so they claim — why, the Left even tried to steal Christmas from them! Every argument is framed so as to perpetuate their perceived victimhood; their battle against gay marriage is not about their own rancid bigotry (of course), but instead about the threat to the sanctity of their own marriages; banning compulsory prayer in a public school is simply about restricting their religion, with never even the most cursory examination of how their religion might have been imposed on someone else. They are perpetually, irrepressibly injured, never without a new grievance or outrage.
For anyone with devoutly religious and/or politically conservative family members, this phenomenon is nothing new. And although it has always been irritating to me, I also found it quite pitiable — what an unfortunate way to spend one’s life, looking for slights and discriminations that weren’t really there, convincing oneself of it until life was little else than miserable expressions of cynical ire.
While this could certainly be offensive to religious people, I read it to say she pities those who are perpetually outraged, not those with devout religious beliefs.
