Friday, February 16, 2007

Marcotte continued

A reader responds to my post about Amanda Marcotte and the successful campaign against her by the head of a large Catholic organization. The reader is a lapsed Catholic, so we'll have to take him with a grain of salt:

I'm afraid you'll have to specify just which "principle" Marcotte's foes are fighting for, unless it is the suppression of opinion. Catholicism is itself an opinion, of course, not a genetically determined condition. Being anti-Catholic in the nineteenth century was bigotry because it was tantamount to being anti-Irish, but today such is no longer the case. Anti-Catholicism now is in fact a form of anti-bigotry -- the same could be said of most forms of opposition to religion.

I'm not going to get in to the broader claims here, interesting as they are, but I will say about Marcotte that what I was trying to say was that I have more respect for criticisms of her based on her views on abortion, which is fair game for someone who has after all become a public and political figure, than for attacks on her use of vulgarities on a personal blog. She seems to think neither is fair, which is an odd position to take to someone devoted to speaking out and even picking fights -- for what is a political campaign but an invitation to debate?

Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:46 PM

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