Edwards’ Bloggers: Stand By Your Bigot

From the New Hampshire Union Leader:

Democratic Presidential candidate John Edwards would love to have the votes of New Hampshire’s numerous Catholics. To get them, he’ll need to explain why he stood by two staff members after he found out about their anti-Christian and anti-Catholic bigotry.

Edwards hired a young woman named Amanda Marcotte as his official campaign blogger, evidently without looking closely into her past work. Among Marcotte’s anti-Catholic screeds was one calling Catholic teachings on birth control “misogyny” and Catholicism itself an “ancient mythology.”

Another Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, called conservative Christians President Bush’s “wingnut Christofascist base.”

When these comments were pointed out to Edwards, he said that while the statements personally offended him, “They both said it was never their intention to malign anyone’s faith, and I take them at their word.”

Calling Catholicism an “ancient mythology” and Christians fascists was not intended to malign? Sorry, Edwards cannot possibly have believed that.

After an Internet uproar, both women resigned. But Edwards remains tarnished. He should have vetted the bloggers more carefully, and he never should have kept them on staff after they were exposed as anti-Christian and anti-Catholic bigots.

The whole incident reveals an appalling lack of respect for Christians in general and Catholics in particular among the two women and Edwards.

Liberal columnist Mark Shields correctly observed of Marcotte, “if she had written similarly about a Jewish person, an Islamic person, a gay or a lesbian, she would be banished to the outer darkness.”

Very true. But among the secular left, Christians, especially Catholics, are fair game.