None of this was especially surprising. The right-wing noise machine's favorite trick, possibly its only trick, is to select a target and start making a fuss, hoping that by creating the appearance of smoke, just enough people will be fooled into thinking there's a fire. Unfortunately, it works. It was the method used to railroad Bill Clinton (Whitewater, Vince Foster, state troopers) and the method that ushered the nation into war with Iraq (WMDs and so on). This time they were only attacking a lowly rookie staffer on a Democratic campaign, but the M.O. was the same.
By Feb. 6, after a week of mud-slinging, the mostly volunteer army of conservative bloggers was failing miserably at elevating their newest noncontroversy to the mainstream media, even if they had done a great job at picking a juicy target. When you've got a mark that you're aiming to humiliate publicly, it helps if she's young and female and doesn't know her place. While their amateurish smears hadn't yet hurt me or the campaign, they had made just enough noise to alert the professionals to the existence of a fresh young feminist target. Or, as it would turn out, two targets.
On the afternoon of Feb. 6, Nedra Pickler e-mailed me a copy of a press release put out by Bill Donohue, the head of the Catholic League, an organization that claims to exist to fight anti-Catholic bigotry, but functionally exists more to feed the right-wing noise machine and attract Catholic voters away from the Democratic Party and toward the Republicans. The press release claimed that Melissa McEwan and I were "anti-Catholic." The case against McEwan was that she had said factually accurate things like, "Some of Christianity's most prominent leaders -- including the Pope -- regularly speak out against gay tolerance." Donohue objected to our use of "vulgar" words. He also quoted a line I'd written that would come to be the favorite quote of Bill O'Reilly, among others:
Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?
A: You'd have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.
The joke was typical of Pandagon's satirical tone and was intended to mock a common rhetorical ploy of abortion opponents -- a hypothetical question and answer -- not to mock anyone's personal faith. Unsurprisingly, Donohue failed to note in his press release accusing me of anti-Catholic bigotry what had really prompted my post: my discovery that the marriage classes at some Catholic churches were passing out anti-contraception materials that had blatant misinformation in them. Pickler e-mailed me the press release and asked for comment at 4:30 Central Standard Time. By 5:30 she had the story written without comment from McEwan or me.
That Donohue easily succeeded where a hundred right-wing bloggers failed is also unsurprising. Donohue has a long, dirty, but bizarrely successful career of conservative hit jobs. As Frances Kissling has noted, Donohue seems to take particular pleasure in silencing women.
In venues ranging from the New York Times to the major cable news networks, Donohue demanded that the Edwards campaign fire McEwan and me. The left blogosphere, furious that a smear artist might try to snap his fingers and bully a Democratic campaign into firing a staffer, pushed back hard. Liza at Culture Kitchen collected just a sampling of the hundreds of blog posts and letters that were protesting the very idea that such a manufactured controversy should have any impact on the staffing of presidential campaigns.
I can't comment on Salon's story about what went on inside the Edwards camp between the publication of Pickler's story and the morning of Thursday, Feb. 8. I can say that the furor seemed as if it had ended when, after a day of official silence from the campaign as well as from us two bloggers, John Edwards announced that the campaign would keep us on, with press releases from McEwan and me stating that we had had no intention of insulting anyone's private beliefs. At this point, Donohue vowed to continue his scorched-earth campaign, stating, "We will launch a nationwide public relations blitz that will be conducted on the pages of the New York Times, as well as in Catholic newspapers and periodicals. It will be on-going, breaking like a wave, starting next week and continuing through 2007."
On Saturday, Feb. 11, during some rare downtime, I returned to personal blogging on Pandagon. I posted a review of the the film "Children of Men," noting that it had a new, nonsexist take on the story of the virgin birth. Donohue struck. He issued a press release on Feb. 12 in which he claimed to be offended by my review. My e-mail in box began to fill up with vitriolic messages, some of them promising violence.
It became apparent to me that there were so many rumors and accusations of my supposed anti-Catholic bigotry that my ability to do my work with the Edwards campaign was suffering. I realized that I couldn't handle the stress of having people flinging an endless stream of baseless accusations at me without being able to come out and defend myself, so I resigned from the campaign.
I held out the hope that with my scalp tacked to his wall, Donohue would leave McEwan alone. That was not to be. Under a similar barrage, she offered her resignation the day after I did. After all was said and done, the Catholic League issued a press release indicating Donohue's pleasure in destroying our careers through a campaign of harassment.
Looking back, the detail that astonishes me the most is the sheer amount of ink, air time, and energy devoted to keeping this phony scandal going until McEwan and I felt we had to resign. One question that's hard to avoid is how much of the venom had to do with the fact that McEwan and I were young women entering into a field (Internet communications) that's viewed as almost monolithically masculine. From my vantage point, it appeared that sexism was one of the primary motivating energies behind the campaign. Even before Donohue stepped in, various right-wing bloggers were obsessed with my gender and sexuality. As I noted at the time of my resignation, the majority of the hate mail I was receiving was from men, and almost all the e-mails made note of my gender or suggested that I would be a more pleasant woman if I wasn't so "angry." Bluntly put, I find it hard to believe that many men would end up being denounced on TV for using words like "fuck" or "cunt" on their blog and expect to receive piles of e-mail offering an opportunity to suck the sender's dick.
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