Anyway, with all due respect, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree with this one. Suffice to say bloggers should not be surprised when their quite visible ‘paper’ trail surfaces…

On the larger issue, you don’t find it offensive – fine, that’s just how it is. Obviously, an awful lot of people did. There’s no right or wrong on whether someone is offended or not – it’s like a sense of humor: everyone has one and no two are the same.

It’s somewhat disingenous, though (more than somewhat, actually) that most of Marcotte’s defenders, as well as Marcotte herself, keep trying to spin this as if it were her beliefs that were under attack (ironic, eh?) and not the way she expressed them…99% of her defenders avoided the quote in question, and that’s the only reason I printed it over and over…

…But hey, I’m tired of Marcotte! Onward and upward…

There are ways to disagree with a person without humiliating them. Marcotte should have learned a valuable lesson here in framing arguments, but I see from her latest that she would rather join Natalie Maines in playing the martyr (again confusing the right to say something with the consequences of saying it), and pretending the uproar was about her support of birth control and abortion rather than her use of over-the-top obscenities …

The “denigrat[ion]” and “ridicule” was not even the crux of her post. It was written at the top of post in italics, as one would put at the beginning of a chapter in a book. Have you read the post that you are continually question or just the two sentences you quote? The rest of the post is indeed full of snark and comments which challenge the theology in general as it relates to birth control. Birth control in itself is a vulgar issue to Catholics in general, so it seems like all discussion of said topic is grounds to get someone in trouble, especially when you get to the point where it no longer bothers you to joke about it and do so on your personal website.

Now, if Marcotte as a blogger wants to be hurtful in this way, that’s one thing…but when she becomes the blogger for the Edwards campaign, her past writings become fair game. She is no more exempt from criticism than Karl Rove, though her role is (would have been) far more limited.

Now there’s nothing I’ve said here or elsewhere that equates to a belief that religious views should be the primary concern of legislation. However, it should be pointed out that a religious person doesn’t make decisions in a vacuum, and of course their faith will color their views on many of the issues of the day, including abortion and birth control (to use one example, you can’t argue for intervention in Darfur on moral grounds on the one hand, and decry the right of the Catholic church to have a stance against abortion on the other – both are public policy decisions informed by moral judgements).

But this was never about Marcotte’s arguments or stances on an issue – it was about her intent to denigrate the views of others by holding them up to ridicule in the most intentionally inflammatory manner possible. It’s like shouting fire in a crowded building, then wondering why you got trampled…

Because to be honest, it seems as if your life must be unbelievably empty if you fill it with baseless accusations against a guy who is basically not banning you out of the kindness of his heart (that’s not a threat, it’s a genuine question).

If you want to come debate issues, that’s one thing…but I won’t respond to you anymore, starting now (I promise) if you just take potshots at me.

I don’t give a damn one way or another, but it’s childish, and it diminishes you in the eyes of everyone else around here…

Abortion I can respect, when it’s divorced from “God doesn’t like abortion” talk. If somebody truly believes that life begins at conception and that abortion is tantamount to murder, I may not agree with them, and I can respect that position. I can understand why it’s a part of their beliefs that they can’t abandon (because they’d then be abandoning the belief that murder is wrong). That one makes sense when divorced from the religious argument.