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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Here's the thing: Bill Donoghue is a bully and a right wing smear campaigner. Still, that doesn't make Marcotte and McEwan's blog postings any less ill informed, insulting and, in that way, bigotted and anti-Catholic. The two bloggers have the right to say what they want, but clearly what they want is to give offense. Bill Donoghue was not the only one who was offended. I'm to the left of most people I know, because of Catholicism not in spite of it. Marcotte and McEwan's ignorance will not stop me from voting for John Edwards, the candidate who best reflects the Catholicsm of my upbringing (with it's focus on the poor and voiceless). Still, Marcotte's explanation of why she quit was self-serving. She and Donoghue are two sides of the same ignorant coin. Intelligent people should ignore them both.
I have to wonder why presidential candidates feel the need to hire high profile bloggers in the first place. The blogging community that reads and comments on each other's blogs is not one that is going to be converted from one side to the other. Just put your candidate's blog up and they will come, regardless of who's running it.
Having said that, the right wing bias that exists in the MSM is readily apparent in the treatment of Amanda Marcotte.
Well if you hate patriarchal and misogynistic religions why don't you go after the worst offender, Muslims. No words of support for your sisters who are forced to live life in a burka or walk two steps behind their man.
What about the Muslim practice of clitorectomies, forced marrige, stoning rape victims, and honor killings. You and your feminist pals are strangely silent when it comes to the repression of women laid out in the Koran. This makes you cowards and hypocrites.
It is amazing that someone could be so lacking in self-awareness that she doesn't realize that the core of the problem is not that others are right-wing, intolerant, misogynistic, or whatever, but simply that she herself is insufferable.
In one of her earlier posts, Ms. Marcotte blames the controversy on the "tin ear" of her right-wing critics. If she cannot understand why her posts would seem offensive to probably more than 80% of the public, then she is the one with the tin ear. If she aspires to help Democratic candidates, I suggest that Ms. Marcotte would benefit from more, not less, exposure to competing viewpoints. Otherwise, she will end up as Pauline Kael who, after George McGovern's thrashing by Richard Nixon, famously said, "How can that be? No one I know voted for Nixon."
Persecution complexes and self-pity may constitute exculpation in Ms Marcotte's mind, but reality is somewhat different. Reminiscent of Sarah Silverman's "Fran" in the classic "Indomitable Spirit" skit -- her "disability": "I'm a woman!" -- Marcotte cannot escape her internal narrative in which she is nothing but a victim, devoid of power, volition, or responsibility for the consequences of her own actions. In this, she ironically fulfills a deeply anti-feminist stereotype of the woman as a passive vessel, into which the faults and obsessions of powerful men are poured. She's not merely done nothing to deserve this, she's done nothing: her persecutors attack her not because of any accomplishment, but merely because of what she is -- not who, as in her own telling, she has no identity or action to be meaningfully and justly against.
Rest assured that this contradiction does not escape Marcotte, even if she cannot publicly admit it. A true ideologue, feminist or otherwise, lives as the ideology demands. The lazy or unintelligent person who loudly and publicly clings to an ideology typically does so in lieu of a well-defined personal identity. You can spot this sort of figure in her dramatic departures from her ersatz faith as soon as there are negative consequences to its practice. Amanda Marcotte is just this sort: having made her name by (to paraphrase the Shark and Shepherd blog) finding an audience that consistently mistakes her tantrums for wit and erudition, it takes her mere days to disavow the very source of her fame once those whom she purports to hate and disrespect pay attention to her. She belittles herself through disavowals, historical revisionism, and words like "noncontroversy": but most of all, she belittles herself through her supine submission to her enemies' demands. Whatever post facto snarling and sniping she may engage in -- and she'll do little else for some time -- this is the bottom line.
This, then, is not a woman with the courage of her convictions. This is a deeply immature and troubled person who is caught between simultaneous realizations that she is profoundly out of bounds in her views and means of expression -- and utterly unable to react to this insight as an adult, lest she lost the final shred of respect that she and her public have for Amanda Marcotte.
"Your “right to react” does not include making threats of violence, rape and death."
Uh, care to point out where I made any threats of violence, rape or death? Or are you just lumping EVERYONE who is critical of Amanda into the same boat? Wait a minute, are you STEREOTYPING me? Shame on you.
Can you show me where all of the progressive Catholics out there that condemned what she wrote called for her death or for violence against her? You mean they DIDN'T do those things? Hmmm.
You're an idiot. Try engaging your infantile brain before opening your yap.
Marcotte wasn't fired or forced to resigned by the Edwards Campaign but rather a combination of the right-wing media feeding frenzy and the threats she received. Whether one agrees with the outcome or Marcotte's decision, the tactics are reprehensible and a threat to Democratic party. I have no doubt that these very same people will use similar tactics to smear whoever is the Democratic Presidential nominee.
I also find the fuss about Jesus' conception to be ironic. Recent scholarship has all but proven that the virgin birth came to Christian texts very late and did not appear in early texts. Its presence is likely is due to either a mistranslation or deliberate revision in the story of Jesus to answer critics who noted that Jesus was an illegitimate child. The only faith Marcotte could have attacked is a faith in a version of the story of Jesus that provably didn't happen.
I agree that Marcotte's statements are somewhat in inflammatory. She'd be more effective digging into history and scholarship surrounding the early gospels. The misognyst interpretation of the Bible relies heavily on the Old Testament and passages in the New Testament that are of questionable authenticity. Though most of the modern faithful don't know it, the Old Testament was only added to the Bible for its prophecy of the messiah. The inclusion of the Old Testament was never intended by the compilers of the canon to be an endorsement of its other contents. Otherwise, all Christians would be bound to live by the Jewish law mandated in the Old Testament.
You totally misunderstand the issue. For Christians, this is not about disproving the Bible, or Christ's conception, or anything like that. If you, or anyone, thinks that that is possible, even with science, even with fact, then you're sorely mistaken. We're not offended by Marcotte's insult because we think it somehow invalidates our faith... it does not. We are offended because it takes two of the characters who are incredibly central to our very view of how the world came to be and why we still exist and aren't doomed to suffer into eternity, drags them through her filthy, vulgar writing, and then she expects us to think it's funny, or ironic, or enlightening.
Imagine, for example, someone took a figure who was central to your entire existence, someone you love and cherish, someone to whom you owe everything... an ailing grandparent, your mother or father, your very best friend, your young child. Imagine some woman who knows nothing about you and your relationship with this person, making vulgar jokes about them, and then expecting you to laugh along, and getting shocked and defensive when you get pissed off. Take that sense of insult and outrage, multiply it about fourteen times, and then you've got some sense of outrage and hurt that we Christians feel when people blatantly disrespect our beloved creator, to whom we dedicate our entire lives and from whom we receive the divine grace that we do not truly deserve.
Trying to "attack" Catholics from a scholarly perspective would have been laughable. Those of you who are outside the religious world don't realize that, within the religious academy, there already exists a very healthy world of research, study, and debate about every issue you could possibly think of. I, for example, just recently read a book on Christian ethics by a liberal, Catholic, feminist author named Lisa A. Cahill, who argues the case for God and homosexuality in the pages of the same book. It's not as unusual as you might think. Donohue may paint a terrible picture on the religious, but we are far more sophisticated, intelligent, and reflective than most people. Read up on feminist theology sometime... there are literally thousands of books written about it. Any attempt by Marcotte to actually dip her toes into this sprawling world of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic academia would have required degrees in Biblical studies or theology. Biblical studies, like science, is not something you can just make up on your own. Liberals laugh at conservative pseudoscientists who try to do the scientist's job by explaining why evolution is not possible, etc. etc. Well, people of faith would laugh at a secular writer with no background in Biblical studies trying to "disprove" our faith ona blog. It just isn't going to happen.
Oh, and please don't try to tell me what the Old Testament was added to the New for. I'm getting my bachelor's degree in history and religion, and I know plenty about the historical-critical method of interpretation. Your oversimplification of that particular issue does not stagger me in awe of how superior your knowledge of the Bible is, as I'm sure you'd hoped it would, but merely reveals that you probably were told that little tidbit and have been waiting for a perfect opportunity to try to use it on a Christian. My professor of the Hebrew Bible from last semester would have probably laughed at you if you'd told the same thing to him....
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