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I just chuckle when I hear Amanda's defenders crying "free speech!" Sure, she has the right to speak her mind. And others have the right to react to it.
Your “right to react” does not include making threats of violence, rape and death.
Amanda, I fully support your and Melissa’s resignations. Not only do you have no obligation to martyr yourselves for the cause of the Democratic party (especially considering that few Democratic candidates or politicians take moral stands that subject them to such targeted attacks—witness Edwards’ tepid defence of you two), what you were subjected to is beyond what anyone should have to face to keep a job.
And thank you, and Salon, for this recap of the past week’s events from your perspective, which has been totally absent from mainstream media coverage until now.
What some commenters here don’t realise (or perhaps don’t care) is that the threatening actions against you and Melissa went beyond mere written words. Melissa reported that at least one stranger drove up to her home and attempted to beat down her front door with his fists. (He fled as she moved to call the police.) She describes her mother as frantic with worry over her safety—a sentiment I can fully understand, being a mother myself.
The likes of Donohue, Malkin, Coulter, Savage, Limbaugh and other Right-Wing windbags know fully well that their inflammatory rhetoric incites actions in the less mentally stable among their followers. They don’t care, nor do the mainstream media which irresponsibly supply them with a microphone and platform. Many of their hate-mongering actions, like Malkin’s publishing of the phone numbers of student peace activists a while back, would land them in jail where I now live in Ireland.
Moreover, Bill Donohue would be laughed out of the pub were he to approach the Irish media with his lunatic ravings. No way would he be taken seriously in Catholic Ireland.
The quality of education in America’s public schools has declined to the point that many Americans are incapable of logical thinking, unable to identify fallacies of association, ad hominem and straw man attacks, half truths, etc. (Blame advertisers for some of this.) Likewise, few Americans truly understand the concepts of freedom of expression and religion. Just as few know the history and religious beliefs of the nation’s founders.
What is more, the Right seems terminally "comedially-challenged." Irony, satire, and parody are totally lost on them.
That right-wing thugs forced two feminist women to resign for what amounts to a freedom of expression issue is real cause for concern for anyone interested in prolonging the political experiment known as the American republic.
