There are lots of issues raised by this episode. Here are a few that come to mind:

1. Did the Edwards campaign do a careful enough job vetting Amanda Marcotte's writing before hiring her to be their blog-master? I'm not saying they shouldn't hire people who have written passionately and provocatively in the past--that would make it impossible for lots of great political activists to enter electoral politics--but you have to wonder if they did their homework.

2. Should the big media that jumped on this story once Bill Donohue blasted the Edwards campaign do a fair job, or did they parrot Donohue without telling their readers of his own, shall we say, checkered record as a would-be opponent of religious defamation? Why is he on a higher pedestal?k

3. Should Marcotte have continued to post on her personal blog after she started working for the Edwards campaign? When I went to work for my partner Andrew Rasiej's campaign for NYC Public Advocate, I stopped blogging at Personal Democracy Forum (and found a terrific pinch-hitter for me in Chris Nolan). I don't understand why Marcotte thought it appropriate or even realistic to keep her personal blogging going.

4. Do we as a community want now more witch-hunting of campaign staffers who have written things in the past that might have offended someone? How far down that slippery slope do we want to go?

Micah

To start, I for one nodded along when Ezra Klein's suggested that Amanda's hire was a great deal suprising. I think it has to make you wonder if the Edwards organization wasn't mostly interested in scoring themselves a high-profile name. Without claiming too much insight into their motivations and thinking, this whole episode does hint at a superficial understanding of online politics, and a certain lack of respect for it to boot.

I'm not at all sure about this, but it seems to me that Amanda's Children of Men review went up at just about the same time she hopped off the Edwards train. (Marcotte is said to have written "The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels." But Pandagon's down due to alleged "asshat spammers," so it's hard to verify much.) Maybe it was a cathartic post, who knows. Either way, posting in the midst of such turmoil might seem appropriate behavior for a blogger, not so much for a campaign staffer. So in my mind, the question before campaigns now is this: when hiring on bloggers/netroots activists/online staffers, just what is it that you want from them? Seems to me that a campaign mining the online world for advantage owes it staffers to tell them just what sort of relationship they've gotten themselves involved in.

2. Should the big media that jumped on this story once Bill Donohue blasted the Edwards campaign do a fair job, or did they parrot Donohue without telling their readers of his own, shall we say, checkered record as a would-be opponent of religious defamation? Why is he on a higher pedestal?

I respect the idea behind the question, but that's really not how the media operates. The story was Amanda Marcotte. If you're charged in court, there is a burden of proof and the motives of your accuser will be questioned.

That isn't the case in the news media. In the media, you have a responsibility to disprove the charges against you regardless of the accuser. Maybe Micah's is a question that needs to be asked of the media, but they are hardly to blame for the concept of guilt by association.

If you hang with thieves and drug dealers, you can't exactly be surprised that people think you might be one. If you hire people with an anti-religious bent (call it anti-theocratic if you want), you can't be surprised if people question your campaign's beliefs on the subject of religion.

If the Edwards camp hired her in ignorance of her writings, that shows a lack of due diligence that indicates a serious flaw in his campaign apparatus. If they hired her despite her past writings, it shows that they were willing to cozy up to someone with anti-religious views in order to score a big name for the credibility and media attention it would garner.

Well, they got the media attention, but not in the way they might have hoped.

It's true that Marcotte's prior writings were controversial enough that the mainstream media could have raised questions without Donohue's intervention. And yes, once the questions were raised, they had to be addressed, regardless of the accuser. But I still don't think the media has done a fair job of informing the public about Donohue's motivations and beliefs.

Let's take a look at one of the things Amanda Marcotte wrote:

"Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology."

As a Catholic, I find that offensive. Equating the Holy Spirit to a human penis and the entire religion to an "ancient mythology". And it was obvious she wrote it with the intent to offend.

It's one thing to argue abortion, gay rights, and the involvement of the church in political matters. It's another to intentionally deride sacred teachings of a religion in a self-righteous manner.

This goes well beyond Bill Donohue, whom I regard as a buffoon and a bigot. I can assure everyone that he doesn't speak for me.

And I don't really see him being put on a pedestal. He's a spokesperson for a relatively large organization. With that, he gets invited on political talk shows. I'm sure Marcotte will now be invited to speak as well.

Think about it. The Edwards campaign hired her in a communications capacity. She's written things that are both highly and intentionally insulting to the religion of 76,000,000 Americans. Please.

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