I’ve been saying for months that the MySpace generation are going to have a big shock when they start to make their way in the world and employers have access to all the intimate that they have shared with their thousand or so friends. Two members of Democrat John Edwards’ staff have given us a glimpse of what that world might look like.
Amanda Marcotte, employed as Mr Edwards’s “blogmaster” to write his official blog, and Melissa McEwan, a part-time technical adviser, said they wished to spare the candidate further damage.
Ms Marcotte’s personal blog, Pandagon, came under fire from the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a nationwide group that attacks what it considers to be liberal anti-religious bias. It called her a “foul-mouthed anti-Christian bigot”, pointing to entries where she accused the church of sanctioning the practice of lying to young couples about birth control and calling God a “sadistic bastard”.
Ms McEwan came under fire for her blog, Shakespeare’s Sister, for labelling President Bush’s religious supporters his “wingnut Christofascist base”.
If you want more, the two blogs in question are Pandagon and Shakespeare’s Sister. They both sound like extremely sensible women to me.
I’m sure that there are a lot of current politicians who are glad that the leaflets and articles that they wrote as students are not so easily searched as the google groups archive, or blogspot.com.However I think the unearthing of these (anti-christian) remarks and the subsequent use of them as an attack can also be considered as part of a broader movement. Consider how social conservatives, neo-conservatives and their religious allies stand in unity when presented with polarising issues.It is the case that atheist politicians cannot win office in the US, but a section of the support for the democratic candidates come from traditionally anti-theistic groups, such as scientists and groups promoting humanist and environmental agendas.I believe it would be easy to cut-and-paste rhetoric from the recent anti-abortionist, anti-gay-marriage, anti-terrorist speaches into anti-atheist speaches without much loss of enthusiasm and hatred. (This is not to suggest that they haven’t hated atheists with enthusiasm ever since the dawn of religion, but the republicans have really presented a unified on-message front for the last 7 years on these core issues (well until recently))Anyway, I can feel a big wave of unified anti-atheistic, aligned right wing groups bringing online their propoganda machine with the anti-christ himself (Richard Dawkins) firmly in their headlights.