Amanda Marcotte has posted a notice at Pandagon that she has resigned her position with the Edwards campaign following the attacks from Bill Donohue. Her post begins:
I was hired by the Edwards campaign for the skills and talents I bring to the table, and my willingness to work hard for what’s right. Unfortunately, Bill Donohue and his calvacade of right wing shills don’t respect that a mere woman like me could be hired for my skills, and pretended that John Edwards had to be held accountable for some of my personal, non-mainstream views on religious influence on politics (I’m anti-theocracy, for those who were keeping track). Bill Donohue—anti-Semite, right wing lackey whose entire job is to create non-controversies in order to derail liberal politics—has been running a scorched earth campaign to get me fired for my personal beliefs and my writings on this blog.
In fact, he’s made no bones about the fact that his intent is to “silence” me, as if he—a perfect stranger—should have a right to curtail my freedom of speech. Why? Because I’m a woman? Because I’m pro-choice? Because I’m not religious? All of the above, it seems.
All of the above, but its more than that. Simply working for a Democratic candidate (and the beliefs that would entail) would be enough to become a target of the religious right. Amanda shouldn’t see this as an attack on her as the same attacks would have been raised against anyone who is on record with similar views. The ultimate goal was not really to attack any individual bloggers but take advantage of any opportunity to attack a candidate whose policies don’t fit in with the agenda of the religious right.
One one bright spot here is that Amanda no longer “has a conflict of interest issue anymore that was preventing me from defending myself against these baseless accusations.” She is far freer as a blogger to take on Donohue than she could be as a member of a political campaign.
While we may have differences of opinion with regards to choice of candidate, we can agree in opposing this type of tactic from people like Donohue. In one of my posts on this issue I mentioned that I couldn’t comment on Amanda’s blogging as I had not previously read Pandagon. I hope readers realized that this was simply due to the vast number of blogs which leads to my only reading a small percentage and never a conscioius decision to ignore it. This has changed under the circumstances. I’ve also added Pandagon to the blog roll and am confident that Amanda will receive wide spread support in her current fight against the intolerance of the religious right.
