It’s on Salon. It’s good stuff, as you’d expect from Amanda; well worth sitting through Salon’s ad-barrier.
While I’m posting on this subject, I thought this post by Ezra made an excellent point:
So the question at hand isn’t whether group hatred can be condoned (it cannot, of course), but whether, for some reason, Catholicism should be protected against irreverent, and even over-the-top, rhetoric. That is a protection our society affords to certain groups — no white man can put on blackface and make jokes about rappers, though black men can put on white face and makes jokes about crackers. Dominant majorities are often strong enough to withstand parody, irreverence, and even attack on their traditions without requiring additional protection, while the same treatment, if deployed against weakened minorities, could enhance ongoing discrimination or cement negative stereotypes believed by the majority. So disrespecting the eucharist isn’t my style, but it doesn’t concern me in quite the fashion mocking the Black work ethic would.
It’s hard to find a stand-out quote from this post at Noli Irritare Leones, because the whole thing is quite thoughtful and nuanced, so just go read it.
Republic of T has an excellent blog round-up, and also adds this comment:
And where faith is concerned — where it’s either , as Matt said, “religion as cover for a political attack” or to justify inequality and injustice for some of your constituencies — if in addressing it you must not “stridently and profanely attack” those who stridently and profanely attack members of your coalition, how do you answer them effectively, and in a way that can be heard above the din of their unrestrained invective?
How do you effectively address bigotry couched in religion, or bigotry disguised as religion, without being an “anti-religious bigot”? If it even is bigotry? Is it bigotry? It it belief, badly expressed?
How do you denounce it? Do you denounce it?
What do you say?
What can you say?
Finally, Brownfemipower asks, “Well, what I’m wondering is how will this affect those big bloggers who *hope* to possibly one day be the chosen lucky one to work for the lovely politicians–or to be chosen to go to lunch with them?” I think that’s a fair question. As is often the case at Brownfemipower’s, the discussion in the comments is must-read.
Yes, it takes enormous talent to strike at the heart of bigotry with precision and power without saying anything that is gratuitously offensive (the plain truth cogently delivered is usually offensive enough). There are some people — like Michael Berube, alas no longer blogging — who have that gift. In all honesty, I do not believe that Amanda Marcotte does. She’s funny and ribald and there are times when I seek her out just to keep my hackles up, but she will never convince someone who doesn’t already agree with her, and that is attributable at least in part to her style, and in part to the fact that she appears to lack the nuanced knowledge of her targets (like theology) that would allow her to aim her strikes more surgically.
P.S. Amp, you have that gift to. That’s why I read you.
Fundamentally, there is a divide between candor (seeking to “speak truth”) and sales (seeking to achieve results). Political campaigns may seek to advance the cause of candor on some issue or other, but ultimately they are sales pitches. They involve creating an image, and more importantly, avoiding distracting images. “Staying on message” means not only saying what you want to convey, but refraining from saying anything else.
We occasionally discuss this candor/sales distinction when we discuss what it means to “be a feminist.” Specifically, if I believed that expressing my candid view in a given situation would harm the cause of women, should I feel the greater loyalty to candor or to promoting the cause of women?
Amanda’s great strength has been her candor; she says what she thinks and lets the chips fall where they may. Joining a sales team always struck me as a bad fit for her. So I’m not so sad about this outcome: Let Amanda be Amanda, let Edwards be a product, and let them go their separate, if somewhat parallel, ways.
Well, Marcotte’s piece on Salon was interesting. She seems to think that the real reason for all the controversy was that she was a young female feminist. She thinks it was all about who she is, and pretty much discounts that it was about the concept that anyone might actually be offended by either her views or the way she expresses them.
The First Amendment guarantees that you can express your views without any consequences from the government. It doesn’t guarantee that you can do so without legally permissible consequences from anyone else, especially their exercise of free speech about your free speech.
Now, my experiences on Free Republic lead me to unfortunately readily believe that she was subjected to quite a bit of true misogyny. The left has no monopoly on fools and a$$holes. It’s wrong and I condemn it. But there’s also a lot to be offended by in what she has said about religion and other things. She’s free to say it – I’d never even think of saying that people should not feel free to criticize religion or anything else. But one of the consequences of publicly expressing your views is that you become associated with them, and that will affect your ability to represent someone else’s views. Does that mean that your career choices will be affected? Yup. That’s the free market for you. As has been pointed out, you don’t see any of the right-wing trogdolytes running blogs for right-wing candidates either.
I’m sorry that she was apparently subjected to a bunch of sexist abuse. But she claims that objections to what she had to say about religion was not in fact based on that but was being used to mask such objector’s true motivations. I believe she’s being self-deceptive there. She tends to hold up the right-wing blogosphere as a stalking horse for the GOP, whereas she paints the left-wing blogosphere as having pure intentions. Machiavelli and Sun Tzu will both tell you that if you fool yourself about your enemy, you’re bound to lose.
The article is about why Amanda felt she had to quit. She didn’t quit because she offended people. She quit because of an unending barrage of harrassment and intimidation over posts that she wrote before she joined the campaign.
Lots of people offend me, but I don’t threaten to rape them or try to hound them from their jobs.
Yes, it does make a difference that Amanda is young, an outsider (in politics and media), an outspoken feminist, and an atheist.
It’s politics at the national level, Lindsay. Harassment and intimidation are water and air.
I do not think for a moment that anti-athiest sentiment is a worse problem in our society than sexism. *IN THIS CASE*, however, I think Amada was brought down far more by her atheism than her feminism. We freethinkers view joking about God’s jizz in Mary and cartoons of Mohamud the way we view joking about Zues’s sex life or cartoons of Napoleon. But the faithful believe that viewing these as equivilent is bigotry. Reading Edwards’ statement of “support”, it souded like her veiwed her vulgar languange as immature but unimportant, and he did not even address the many complaints that she is “anti-male”, which suggested to me he did not take that as a serious complaint in the least. He did seem sencerely concerned with the anti-religous tone of her comments: that appears to be the only area he questioned her and the other feminist blogger about. As a religous liberal, he may have been concerned with not allowing what appeared to him to be religous intollerence in his campaign. He is wrong, but we freethinkers need to start shouting about this until the mainstream realizes that it is bigotry not to allow us to treat religous beliefs with the same mixure of tolerence and skepticism with which we treat all beliefs.
It may very well be that she was targeted because of her feminism, I think that is debateable, but I think she was vulneable because of her atheism, or more accurately, her atheist outlook. (Treating religious opinions the same as any other.) Of these two, the vulnerability is more important, since the right-wing attack machine will eventually get around to attacking ANYONE on the left who is high-profile and vulnerable, whatever the motive.
…not to allow us to treat religous beliefs with the same mixure of tolerence and skepticism with which we treat all beliefs.
But you are allowed to treat religious beliefs that way. You may fill volumes with God jizz jokes and flood the intertubes with your learned disquisitions on how the Virgin Birth is a patriarchal rape fantasy. Go nuts – you’re allowed.
And the rest of us are allowed to think you’re an asshat, and say things like “I’m not going to vote for a candidate who hires people who think like that”, and act accordingly. We can even make blog posts about how we think your ideas are crap, and go on media shows to say that we feel offended by your statements, and send you hostile e-mails.
We can’t threaten your safety; that’s out of bounds, and unconscionable, and actionable. But short of that, we – like you – can do what we God damn well please.
You don’t have to read the e-mails. You don’t have to look at the blog posts. You can shut off O’Reilly. You can send letters to the candidate to let him know that you will give him EXTRA votes because you like the people he hangs with. You, like us, are free people.
Freedom, however, does not relieve us of the consequences of our actions.
Robert –
I did not mean to use the phrase “not to allow” in a government censorship way, I meant it in a “Overton Window of Political Possibilities” way. And when I first your comment I intended to apologize for the word “allow”, because I do think too many people scream censorship when they mean something less. But frankly, re-reading my comment, I think it was quite obvious that, IN CONTEXT, I was not alledging censorship, and it was disingenuous of you to read it that way. After all, our shouting would be useless against censorship, but it is what is needed to open the Overton window.
Ron, if it wasn’t because of who I was, answer two questions:
1) Why was the target selected first and then the reasons to attack selected next? This is clearly the case, because they went through a series of baseless attacks, from the scrubbing thing to the not-hot thing to the screechy thing to finally the Catholic “bigotry” thing, which while untrue was just sexy enough a charge to stick? If it was WHAT I said not WHO I was, then how is it that the WHO proceeded the WHAT in their attacks?
2) If it wasn’t the young feminist thing, but WHAT I said, then why was Melissa hounded out of her job? She didn’t say what I said. However, she is a young feminist like me, so we were treated as a two-headed feminist monster in the media. Fascinating that Melissa was held responsible for WHAT I said, unless of course, you admit that it wasn’t my writing that was the issue but the fact that I do it.
Ron F;
It annoys me that you say “I’m sorry that she was apparently subjected to a bunch of sexist abuse.”
Why “apparently”? Why not “I’m sorry she was subjected to a bunch of sexist abuse?”
Next verse, same as the first…
Pingback: Marcotte Polo at Blog P.I.
Amanda, you are not really the intended victim of Donohue’s campaign, rather, John Edwards is. You just happened to be incredibly cheap cannon fodder, and Melissa was the innocent bystander in the way. Donohue doesn’t care about you or what you say except insofar as he can tar Edwards with your words, accurately restated. This is truly the sine qua non of political scheming in the modern era — discrediting one’s opponents by whatever means are available. I’m sorry you got caught up in it, I’m sure when you wrote whatever, you did not have a career in politics in mind.
The Repubs are going the religion route to oppose the resolution against the surge in Congress (anti-“Islamic extremism”) and they’re using it here. I think it’s part of the ridiculous overall “Crusade” strategy. So Republicans are going after 1) atheists and nonbelievers and 2) Amanda and Melissa because they’re female and easy to pick on.
I’m disturbed by the sheer volume of “she was asking for it” responses on this issue. I’ve read Amanda’s post revealing some of the emails she’s received and I’ve read about some of the intimidation suffered by Melissa. It’s disgusting. It’s horrifying. It’s unconscionable. I don’t want to imagine the horror I’d feel if those words and actions were aimed in my direction.
And some of us want to wave our hands and say, “Well it’s national politics! What did you expect?”
My God, what is this country? Is this who we are?
Especially since she was recruited out of the blue:
To these idiots, accepting a job offer is asking for it.
It’s really a shame that the Donahue smear machine is the party seen as responsible for this. Amanda was a poor fit (outspoken to the point of polemic) for a presidential campaign (needs to appeal to, or at least not annoy, most people), I think it was a mistake that Edwards offered, a mistake that she accepted, and a mistake that she left.
It’s also a tremendous shame that the people on the right who make Amanda’s outspokenness look like absolute meekness don’t get given the same treatment.
Amanda Marcotte Writes:
February 16th, 2007 at 12:04 pm Ron, if it wasn’t because of who I was, answer two questions:
1) Why was the target selected first and then the reasons to attack selected next? This is clearly the case, because they went through a series of baseless attacks, from the scrubbing thing to the not-hot thing to the screechy thing to finally the Catholic “bigotry” thing, which while untrue was just sexy enough a charge to stick? If it was WHAT I said not WHO I was, then how is it that the WHO proceeded the WHAT in their attacks?
Wrong Amanda . The target was left wing extremists and Donahue and his ilk are not the only ones who have been looking at them. Also, Democrats are not the only ones who are aware of the power of the Internet. Your Blog is popular for a reason and as such drew attention. Pandagon is far from the only Blog which has been actively captured via screen shots. The fact that you tossed such easy softballs and the timing of your joining on to the Edward’s campaign, simply played into Donahue’s hands.
2) If it wasn’t the young feminist thing, but WHAT I said, then why was Melissa hounded out of her job? She didn’t say what I said. However, she is a young feminist like me, so we were treated as a two-headed feminist monster in the media. Fascinating that Melissa was held responsible for WHAT I said, unless of course, you admit that it wasn’t my writing that was the issue but the fact that I do it
Melissa made her own comments which were considered offensive by some people. As for the media, they dish out plenty of the same to Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter . You both chose to practice your first amendment rights and were responded to in kind. What is the problem? As a feminist you should stop playing the victim role and accept the heat like a real trooper. If either you or Melissa lack the temperament to handle criticism you should step aside.
Having read many of your posts I do not find your explanation about scrubbing the Duke case missive to be credible. It seems much more likely that you chose a position which would play better in the media while allowing yourself to not make an actual retraction.
Now consider those comments coming back in the very near future when both the criminal charges against the Duke players are about to heat up as well as the case against Nifong .Note too the close proximity of Durham County to Edwards’ headquarters in the same state and you can imagine the media circus which would ensue.
Melissa, you might want to consider what one newspaper n Seattle had to say on the matter. Perhaps you simply fail to look at how your writing seem to other folks.
It’s too bad the brash-mouthed babes of John Edwards’ campaign blog resorted to gutter-speak to make their points because, in the resulting fracas, their points got lost in the right- and left-wing jabbing and parrying so prominent in today’s non-stop news cycle.
Vulgar, yes. Too vulgar to reproduce here. And counterproductive, I might add. Like sticking your chin out to your opponent, handing him a boxing glove and asking him to break your jaw. The Catholic League, a conservative advocacy group that, like all advocacy groups, makes a bid to grab media attention whenever the occasion arises, issued a call for the Edwards campaign to fire the bloggers. And the bloggers had given the League every valid reason to do so with their angry, vituperative denunciations of Catholics and faith.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/303892_erbe16.html
I considered using your own language in attacking feminists to show how it would feel. I guarantee you that it would have been lost on most and my banning would be immediate.
If you are going to play in this arena you need to take as well as you give. Consider it.
Best wishes.
Amanda was a good fit for the campaign. She just never got a chance to be judged on her work as John Edwards’ blogmaster. Her background at Pandagon ended up being a liability–but that was because of cynical political backstabbing, not substantive defects in her performance on the job.
Sorry , I meant to say Amanda rather than Melissa
I did not mean to use the phrase “not to allow” in a government censorship way, I meant it in a “Overton Window of Political Possibilities” way.
I understood what you meant, and didn’t think you were alleging censorship.
After all, our shouting would be useless against censorship, but it is what is needed to open the Overton window.
So open it. But we get (“are allowed”) to push back, and to close it, or open it in another direction, etc.
Amanda:
Ron, if it wasn’t because of who I was, answer two questions:
1) Why was the target selected first and then the reasons to attack selected next?
The “target” was John Edwards (still is), and any other Democrat.
See, here’s how it works. We’re Republicans. You’re Democrats. We fight over power. When one of us does something stupid, you guys go on the attack and try to exploit it as much as possible. When one of you does something stupid, we go on the attack.
John Edwards did something stupid. He hired someone with a paper trail of provocative comments that would piss off a bloc of voters that he needs. So we attacked. If he had hired a black male nationalist who’d said “kill whitey”, we’d have attacked that. If he’d hired a white communist who’d said “smash capitalism”, we’d have attacked that.
The facts that you’re a woman, a feminist, etc. couldn’t be less relevant to this case. It’s certainly a fact that some of the people attacking you are sexists and/or anti-feminists – just as it would be a fact that if Edwards had hired Malcolm X Jr., some of the people on the attack would probably have been anti-black or racist. But all of the people on the attack are anti-Edwards – because he, not you or Malcolm, is the real target.
2) If it wasn’t the young feminist thing, but WHAT I said, then why was Melissa hounded out of her job?
Guilt by association, pretty much. Unfair, but oh well.
Why “apparently”? Why not “I’m sorry she was subjected to a bunch of sexist abuse?”
That’s how I phrase it in situations like this when I’m seeing a characterization of someone else’s remarks second hand (having not read them myself).
Ron, if it wasn’t because of who I was, answer two questions:
1) Why was the target selected first and then the reasons to attack selected next? This is clearly the case, because they went through a series of baseless attacks, from the scrubbing thing to the not-hot thing to the screechy thing to finally the Catholic “bigotry” thing, which while untrue was just sexy enough a charge to stick? If it was WHAT I said not WHO I was, then how is it that the WHO proceeded the WHAT in their attacks?
I didn’t say that nobody went after you because you are who you are. I’m saying that, based on what you wrote in that Salon piece, it appears to me that you are presuming that those people who say that they are offended by what you’ve written about religion are lying about that being their motivation for their remarks about you and for any pressure they put on the Edwards campaign to get rid of you. I think you’re wrong about that. The right is no more monolithic than the left. There’s plenty of people who would be offended by the remarks of yours that I’ve seen quoted during all this, and those remarks would be sufficient for them to call for John Edwards to disassociate himself from them regardless of any of your other views or activities.
Look up who the spokespeople have been for successful candidates and officeholders. Now look up their personal publicly known statements on controversial issues and see what you can find (not counting what they said or wrote after they’d left their spokespersons’ jobs). You may find some exceptions, but overall you’re not going to find a lot.
If it wasn’t the young feminist thing, but WHAT I said, then why was Melissa hounded out of her job?
I have no idea what was going on with her. I was talking about what I’d heard about you and what I read in your Salon piece.
Unfair, but oh well.
That’s what we love about the right wing; principles are useful as a club, but that’s about it.
That’s what we love about the right wing; principles are useful as a club, but that’s about it.
There’s no room for principles in politics. The stakes are too high.
Robert-
If you knew what meant, there was simply no point to your comment. Were you warning that if we provoke your side with our opinion, your side will retaliate by calling us asshats, etc.? Of course. You already do that. That is why the Overton window does not let our veiws in. Was there anything in my comments that suggested people like you would not resort to all of your usual tactics? Or that you had no right to them? I am saying that we are already on the outside of the window, we have nothing to lose.
On another thread, discussing the confederate flag, I wrote that I agreed with Hugo when Hugo wrote:
Then Robert replied:
The question I was discussing regarding Amanda’s post wasn’t whether or not it could legitimately be seen as offensive or insulting, but whether or not it was correct to interpret this as anti-Catholic bigotry on Amanda’s part. I was extremely explicit, in fact, about distinguishing between the concepts of “offensive” and “bigoted.”
If anyone had asked me if I think it would be better if Amanda — along with about a billion other rude bloggers — were more polite in their approach to political argument, I’d say: yes, it would be better. Everyone should be more civil, in my opinion. That’s one reason I try and model civility in my own blog writings, as best as I’m able.
But that wasn’t the issue under discussion. The issue under discussion, in the Creative Destruction thread I think you’re referring to, was if it’s fair to conclude that Amanda is an anti-Catholic bigot, and I’m quite certain that’s not a fair conclusion.
I’ve said repeatedly that I don’t think Christians are wrong if they feel offended by Amanda’s God-cums-in-Mary’s-ear joke. I also don’t think blacks are wrong to feel offended by the confederate flag.
But I do feel there are important differences between the two cases.
1) There’s a difference between implying “I think your ideas are wrong and should be mocked” and implying “I think it was cool that your ancestors were enslaved because they had skin your color.” The latter is legitimately much, much more offensive.
Christian theology is a set of ideas that can be legitimately disagreed with and even mocked by decent people. (As we’ve discussed on another blog, both you and I told blasphemous jokes at least as offensive as Amanda’s when we knew each other in college).
In contrast, agreement with the Confederacy’s ideas — specifically, its ideas about race — is not legitimate in our society, and never happens among decent people.
2) As Ezra wrote (and I quoted in a post last week):
Christians predominate this culture; frankly, the least y’all could do is learn to be good sports. I don’t expect blacks to feel the same way about slavery, however.
That’s so offensive, Amp! ;D
(and so terribly, terribly funny)
Also, well answered!