Justus For All

washingtonpost.com

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards said Thursday he was personally offended by the provocative messages two of his campaign bloggers wrote criticizing the Catholic church, but he’s not going to fire them.Edwards issued a statement and answered questions about the fate of Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, two days after the head of the conservative Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights demanded they be fired for messages they wrote before working on the campaign.

“I talked personally to the two women who were involved. They gave me their word they, under no circumstances, intended to denigrate any church or anybody’s religion and offered their apologies for anything that indicated otherwise. I took them at their word,” Edwards told reporters during a campaign stop in Charleston, S.C.

I haven’t commented on this story before, but I think I will say a few words now.  First off, the Edwards campaign made a very bad choice, especially in hiring Marcotte.  I don’t know if these two bloggers should be fired or not, but certainly the person that hired them should be.

I also suspect that this will periodically haunt Edwards throughout the campaign, and the issue won’t just disappear.

I first started reading Amanda Marcotte when she began posting at Pandagon, and quickly grew tired of her ranting.  When Ezra Klein got his own site, I dropped Pandagon and moved there.  It isn’t that Klein is less liberal then Marcotte, but that he has more to write about then how bad men treat women, and he can make a blog post that isn’t full of four letter words.  I don’t have anything against profanity in and of itself, and I have been known to use a colorful expression a time or two myself, but if that is all you can write, if that is the limit of how you can express yourself then you should perhaps work a little on your writing style and expanding your vocabularly.  That doesn’t mean you can’t ever use profanity, sometimes it is appropriate, but if it is a constant thing then people will form an unfavorable opinion of you.
Melissa McEwen, known more as Shakespeare’s sister is not nearly as bad, and if Amanda hadn’t been hired by the Edwards campaign at the same time, I don’t think there would have been any issue.  It is sad really that she got dragged into this.

I think that anyone who blogs, whether they think they do so anonymously or not, should always remember that what they write is being published everywhere and will never go away.  I don’t think that means a person should be afraid to express their opinions, or even explore half-baked ideas, but they should remember that the manner in which they do so will reflect on them, for good or ill, for a long time to come.  People are certainly free to judge us based upon how we use our freedom of expression.

As for Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwen, it seems that Edwards is giving them a chance to behave is a different manner then they have in the past.  Hopefully they will learn from this expirience and develop a more mature way of expressing their opinions.  They probably don’t deserve this chance, but good for Edwards for giving it to them anyway.