The absolutists, on the other hand, claim this is a failed strategy and want to come out of the closet as full-throated soldiers in the war on women and sex, by directly attacking Roe v. Wade and taking the fight beyond abortion to contraception. Absolutists have managed to go around the more mainstream antiabortion movement, passing legislation and gaining ground in the Republican Party. They’ve even managed to make Democrats cower, as evidenced by the highly unusual decision of HHS to overrule the FDA’s decision to make Plan B available over the counter.

Who are some of these absolutists? Here’s a snapshot of some of the organizations that are demanding not just immediate challenges to Roe, but also want a rapid escalation of the war on women’s right to contraception and other forms of basic reproductive healthcare.

Personhood USA. This is the umbrella group for various state activist groups pushing to get “personhood amendments” onto the ballot. Unlike most anti-choice organizations that push for a variety of actions, Personhood USA has only one ostensible goal, to amend state constitutions to get fertilized eggs defined as legal “persons.” Behind this seemingly simple goal lies a radical agenda. Not only would personhood amendments ban abortion, but they would also make it illegal to treat ectopic pregnancies, save women suffering incomplete miscarriages from dying of sepsis, open up criminal investigations of miscarriages, and ban IVF and research on stem cells. Personhood advocates have repeatedly suggested that it should also be used to ban the birth control pill and the IUD, which they incorrectly argue work by killing fertilized eggs. The radical nature of the initiative made it impossible to pass in Mississippi, arguably the most conservative state in the country, giving incrementalists ammo in their argument against the absolutist approach.

Live Action. That absolutists can’t get their agenda past the voters doesn’t mean that their radical approach is a failure, however. After all, they don’t have to win over voters so long as they control the Republican Party on the choice question.  Live Action provides some of the best evidence of the success of the absolutist approach. Live Action openly supports the absolutist agenda, putting its support behind personhood initiatives and attacking Planned Parenthood not just for providing abortions, but because the organization is willing to provide STD and contraception information to minors and self-identified sex workers.

Early in 2011, Live Action launched a series of deceptively edited videos that managed only to prove that Planned Parenthood follows the law, provides perfectly legal healthcare to minors and self-identified sex workers, and immediately complies with reporting laws regarding the abuse of minors. Even though it did nothing but prove that Planned Parenthood obeys the law and standard medical ethics, Live Action still managed to compel a national crisis over Title X funding offered to clinics that provide contraception services, which culminated in the Republicans threatening to shut down the federal government if contraception subsidies weren’t immediately halted. This, even though 77 percent of Republican voters support contraception subsidies.  The word “abortion” was thrown around a lot to justify this attack on Title X, but at the end of the day, Live Action and the Republicans were attacking contraception, as Title X legally cannot subsidize abortion.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. The USCCB presents itself simply as a support structure for American Catholic churches, but a large wing of the organization is devoted to lobbying for extremist anti-choice policies that are often far beyond anything being asked by incrementalist anti-choice activists. Conservative media threw a fit when Nancy Pelosi described this group as “lobbyists,” but the term is utterly accurate. The USCBB does spend a great deal of time and  money lobbying for severe restrictions on abortion and contraception access.

The USCBB lobbies for an overturn of Roe, but that’s only the tip of their anti-choice advocacy. They exploited the healthcare reform debate to try to push for Congress to prevent private insurance companies from covering abortion care. They have taken a strong anti-contraception stance that makes fallacious, unscientific claims about contraception, including claiming that contraception artificially induces an unhealthy state (something actual medical experts would strongly argue against) and making unscientific claims about how contraception works. Currently, they are demanding that religiously affiliated organizations that take taxpayer money, such as hospitals and universities, be allowed to deny contraception coverage to female employees, many of whom aren’t even Catholic. They are also fighting the Obama administration’s choice to give grants to groups that offer complete healthcare to trafficking victims instead of giving them to Catholic organizations that refuse contraception or abortion referrals for women who have been forced into prostitution, suggesting that their main concern isn’t getting women out of trafficking situations, but blocking them from having healthy and consensual sex lives after escaping forced prostitution.

Ohio ProLife Action. As described in the New York Times, Ohio Right to Life refuses to support a bill that would ban all abortions after a heartbeat is detectable, not because they don’t wish they could, but because they believe it’s a political loser. The heartbeat is less extremist than personhood initiatives, but that’s like saying it’s less dark at 10 p.m. than midnight: technically true, but not particularly relevant. The heartbeat bill is a direct assault on Roe v. Wade, and Ohio RTL wants to wait until the Supreme Court is even more conservative before challenging Roe.

Meanwhile, the heartbeat bill is far more extreme than the simple abortion bans that were in place prior to Roe. Medical exceptions were available prior to Roe, and if a woman showed up in the emergency room with an incomplete miscarriage, doctors were allowed to save her life by removing the failing pregnancy. Under the heartbeat bill, doctors would be forced to wait until any kind of pulse in the embryo had ended before intervening, which would put women at risk of sepsis and would likely result in unnecessary deaths — all to save pregnancies that were unsalvageable to begin with. Ohio RTL likely realizes that it’s hard to endear yourself to voters when you stand up for torturing or even killing women for having incomplete miscarriages, so Ohio ProLife Action was formed to support this attack on women’s right not just to choose, but to survive a pregnancy gone wrong.

Susan B. Anthony List. Anti-choicers fallaciously claiming to be supportive of some “older” form of feminism have been around nearly as long as conservatives supporting racist policies while quoting MLK, and so the SBA List is doing nothing new with its ahistorical claims that irreligious, childless Anthony would have, if she were alive today, somehow miraculously supported its highly religious assault on abortion rights. But SBA List stands for a lot more than a simple overturn of Roe. In the name of Susan B. Anthony, who aligned herself with the 19th century “voluntary motherhood” movement that turned into the birth control movement, the SBA List has expanded into assaults on contraception access. SBA List has worked strenuously to defund contraception programs both on the national and international level. It claims to do so out of opposition to abortion, but in reality, the funds that it objects to that go to Planned Parenthood and the United Nations Population Fund are used strictly for non-abortion reproductive health services. UNFPA does not provide abortion services or referrals, but because it prevents women from dying of botched abortions and offers contraception services, SBA List opposes them. Even under Roe, doctors were permitted to treate women suffering from botched abortions, but SBA List embraces a far more radical vision than a mere repeal of women’s right to legal abortion.

In addition, SBA List put together a pledge for Republican presidential candidates to sign that hinted at a strong anti-contraception agenda with calls for the HHS and NIH to be staffed with “pro-life” leadership. Under George Bush, such leadership did more than simply oppose abortion, but fought against expanded contraception access at every turn. SBA List’s request for more of the same would endanger HHS regulations requiring insurance companies to treat contraception as preventive care that should be offered without a co-pay to insured women.

Leslee Unruh with the Alpha Center. Leslee Unruh is a one-woman machine of anti-choice extremism in South Dakota. Unruh was instrumental in getting complete abortion bans on the ballot in South Dakota not once, but twice (both were voted down). Unable to get an abortion ban in South Dakota the honest way, anti-choice South Dakota legislators, who appear to hang on Unruh’s every word, passed a law requiring women to seek “counseling” from anti-choice crisis pregnancy centers before being allowed to have an abortion. Unruh’s CPC was clearly the one that they had in mind, as it’s right down the street from the Planned Parenthood in Sioux Falls that is the sole provider of abortion in the entire state. The legislation would basically force women to go through Leslee Unruh and her staff before they could have an abortion.

If you go to Alpha Center and aren’t pregnant, you’re still out of luck, because they certainly don’t offer contraception counseling for those who wish to avoid pregnancy. In addition to being antiabortion, Unruh is an outspoken anti-contraception activist who claims that the birth control is “playing God” and that women should forsake contraception because Unruh personally would like to see “more babies.” In addition to her CPC, Unruh runs the Abstinence Clearinghouse, which lobbied heavily for abstinence-only education during the Bush administration and now sells materials denouncing contraception, premarital sex (and premarital kissing), and even masturbation, even going so far as to threaten young people who send sexy text messages with claims that doing so causes depression and suicide.

American Life League. The American Life League is an oldie but a goodie. Just as the Tea Party couldn’t get started without some long-standing far-right organizations feeding them radical ideas, ALL led the charge of the hard-right turn of the absolutist anti-choicers. Before personhood amendments were even on the anti-choice radar, ALL was demanding not just an overturn of Roe, but also an overturn of Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 Supreme Court decision that legalized contraception for married couples. ALL has an annual anti-Griswold event called “Pills Kills,” where it charmingly argues against legal contraception on the grounds that it supposedly kills marriages. The theory is that sexual encounters that don’t make babies somehow drive couples apart, a theory that the 99 percent of American women who have used contraception at some point in their lives would find hard to believe.

ALL doesn’t even bother with claims that it objects to contraception spending because of poorly established links to abortion. This is a group that uses scare quotes around the term “reproductive health services,” implying that a woman getting a Pap smear in order to prevent dying of cervical cancer is not receiving legitimate healthcare, but is instead participating in some kind of anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-God conspiracy. In addition to objecting generally to women’s reproductive healthcare, ALL fights mandatory vaccination, linking pages that claim falsely that the MMR is made from aborted fetuses, and that these aborted fetuses cause autism. For “pro-life” people, they heavily support increasing the incidence of often-fatal diseases such as cervical cancer and preventable childhood illness.

The entire anti-choice movement of Kansas. Maybe it was because Operation Rescue kept getting away with consorting with violent people and known terrorists. Maybe it’s because it was aided and abetted by District Attorney Phill Kline, who abused his power to get the private medical records of abortion patients, which had information in them that miraculously became available to people who had absolutely no right to read them, such as Bill O’Reilly. (Kline’s license to practice law in Kansas has been indefinitely suspended due to his unethical behavior.) Maybe there’s something in the water in Kansas. For whatever reason, the Kansas anti-choice movement brings the concept of extremism to a new level.

Unlike Ohio RTL, Kansas RTL offers full-throated support to a personhood amendment, as part of its interconnections with American Life League. It claims that this will “restore” personhood to fertilized eggs, but in fact this law would be far more extreme than anything that was in place prior to Roe. The Kansas Coalition for Life continues to brag about the daily harassment it dealt to Dr. George Tiller, even though the harassment campaign culminated in an assassination of Dr. Tiller while he was in church in 2009. Instead of showing remorse for the role it played in painting a target on  his back, KCFL moved on to the next target, Dr. Leroy Carhart, creating fliers with descriptions of his offices in nearby Nebraska with pictures of the doctor prominently displayed. Kansans for Life seems relatively mild compared to these two, but they still support defunding Title X subsidies for contraception. They also trade heavily in conspiracy theories around former pro-choice Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, accusing her of destroying evidence against Planned Parenthood in one of the various harassment lawsuits that anti-choicers in the state have filed against the organization.

By ordinary American standards, incrementalists are already radical, with their willingness to make abortion increasingly difficult to get while working toward an eventual overturn of Roe v. Wade. But by anti-choice standards, incrementalists are beginning to look almost moderate, simply because they have patience when it comes to stripping women of basic human rights. Unfortunately for them, the wild-eyed fanatics who want to strip all abortion rights and contraception and do it now are gaining prominence and power, and the fealty of conservative politicians who are afraid of looking “soft” on sexually active women.

Robert Jeffress, the influential senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, went on “Focal Point” with Bryan Fischer and declared that one shouldn’t support Mitt Romney for president because Romney, a Mormon, isn’t a real Christian. This created a media dustup that was silly even by the usual standards of ever-sillier mainstream media campaign coverage. John King of CNN interviewed Jeffress, focusing strictly on the question of who Jeffress believes deserves to be called a Christian, and how firmly he believes that only people he calls Christians should hold public office. Candy Crowley of CNN dogged both Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann on the question of whether they believe Romney is a Christian, and then she got irate with the candidates when they refused to answer the question, claiming that it’s irrelevant.

These interviews are remarkable for what the CNN anchors didn’t discuss, which was the most important question of all: the separation of church and state. Even though our nation has a tradition of pastors staying out of partisan politics — in fact, it is illegal for ministers to endorse candidates from the pulpit — it seemingly never occurred to King to challenge Jeffress for overstepping his bounds by telling people that God wants an evangelical Christian who is a Republican for president. By making the story about whether or not Mormons are Christians, CNN left the viewer with the impression that only Christians deserve to hold public office, and that the only thing left to debate is whether someone “counts” as a Christian, making him or her eligible for office.

We’re a long way from the days when John Kennedy assured the public that he respected the separation of church and state and would keep his faith separate from his policy-making decisions. Now, even mainstream reporters take it as a given that politicians will let religion govern their actions, and the only thing left to debate on theology is how many angels any single politician believes dance on the head of a pin. Things that used to be considered beyond the pale in politics, such as religious intolerance or ministers blatantly claiming they know who God supports in an election, have become normalized to the point where someone like Mitt Romney, who is odious in most respects but has never really made much fuss over his faith, is seeing religious tests becoming a major issue in his campaign.

The ramifications for this shift affect more than conservative Mormons trying to win as Republicans. By not challenging the assertion that only Christians should hold office, mainstream journalists encourage bigotry against all religious minorities, including atheists. Atheists already face discrimination when it comes to running for public office. A number of states ban atheists from holding public office, even though the U.S. Constitution explicitly forbids religious tests for office. Of course, it’s difficult for an atheist to win enough votes to get into office, so this conflict hasn’t been tested much, although one atheist city council member found himself under fire by religious bigots who wanted to use North Carolina’s ban on atheists holding office to push him out for not swearing his oath of office on the Bible.

There’s a reason the Founding Fathers wrote a national constitution that forbade religious tests for office and required the separation of church and state. It’s not just because protection is needed against the escalating religious bigotry we’re seeing lately, but also because religion should have no place in politics in the first place. Neither atheists nor believers benefit when leaders are guided more by religious dogma than by rationality. Angels and demons might be a fine thing to worry about when you’re in church on Sunday, but when you’re trying to govern real people in the real world, it’s far better to rely on evidence and empirical facts, interpreted through reason and not through the guesswork of faith. This is why Kennedy defended himself against questions about his faith by saying, “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote.”

People like Robert Jeffress, when they propose religious tests for office — even ones held privately by voters — should face more challenges than reporters simply asking whether they consider Mormons “real” Christians. They should be confronted with Kennedy’s words and asked directly why they disagree with our former president about the separation of church and state. They should be asked why they believe only a certain breed of Christians should hold office, and asked why they think it’s appropriate to demand that politicians put religious dogma before evidence-based and rational approaches to policy. Anything less than that is aiding the religious right in its mission to remake our secular democracy into a theocracy. It shouldn’t be tolerated.

After all, the Republican House speaker, John Boehner, has identified limiting women’s access to abortion and contraception as a “top priority” — this with the economy is in tatters and the world in turmoil. Boehner’s and the GOP’s abortion fixation raises an obvious question: Why now, when there are so many other pressing issues at stake?

There isn’t just one explanation. The assault on reproductive rights is intensifying now because of a convergence of several otherwise unrelated events that have created the perfect moment for the anti-choice movement to go for the kill.

Republicans have managed to score a couple of major victories against women’s rights in the past few years. Both of the main obstacles to dismantling reproductive rights — the Supreme Court and the Democrats — have buckled under anti-choice pressure, emboldening the movement to demand even more, including rollbacks on contraception access.

In 2007, the Supreme Court, with a 5-4 vote, upheld the Partial Birth Abortion Act, which not only set a precedent of the court validating a ban on an abortion procedure necessary to preserve some women’s lives, but also introduced a new justification to limit women’s rights. Justice Anthony Kennedy argued in the majority opinion that the D&X procedure could be banned in order to save women from the possibility of regret down the road. After this ruling, anti-choice bills sprung up like weeds, many of them rooted in this same assumption that women are too silly to be trusted to make their own decisions. Waiting periods, ultrasound requirements and forced “counseling” all make accessing abortion that much harder — even as each step is dressed up as protection for women against their own flightiness and inability to make good decisions.

But the bigger victory was getting a Democratic president to sign an executive order barring insurance companies from offering abortion coverage to customers who are using federal subsidies to pay for insurance. Barack Obama signed the order under duress; there was no way to pass his healthcare reform bill without doing so. But the lesson for Republicans was clear: When it comes to reproductive rights, they don’t actually need to be in charge to get their way. If reproductive rights can be exploited to nearly derail healthcare reform while the Democrats control Congress and the presidency, think of how much leverage the issue gives them now that they’ve gained control of the U.S. House and a bunch of new statehouses.

It’s hard to overstate how much Republican energy is invested in bringing the uteruses of America under right-wing control. The House went into an anti-choice frenzy upon being sworn in in January, passing two bills that would eliminate private insurance funding for abortion, one that would dramatically cut funding for international family planning, and the Pence Amendment, which would ban Planned Parenthood from receiving any federal funding. And in case the Pence Amendment doesn’t work, the House also zeroed out all funding for Title X, which subsidizes reproductive healthcare for low-income patients, in the continuing resolution that funds the federal budget.

For the right, rolling back reproductive rights is considered a worthy goal in its own right, but since the issue could also provoke a budget showdown that could result in a government shutdown, it’s also a useful tool in their effort to force Democrats to blink. As with their push to bust unions at the state level, Republicans stand to gain electorally by wreaking havoc on the pro-choice movement and undermining its ability to get out the vote for Democrats.

On the state level, an unprecedented number of anti-choice bills are being introduced in response to the perceived anti-choice bent of the Supreme Court. Florida alone has introduced 18 separate anti-choice bills. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has declared mandatory ultrasounds for abortion patients an emergency priority, and fast-tracked it through the Legislature. Three separate states have introduced bills that could legalize domestic terrorism against abortion providers, though a bill in South Dakota was withdrawn under pressure. Instead, that state’s Legislature moved on to pass the most draconian abortion law in the country, one that would require a woman to wait 72 hours for an abortion and listen to a lecture from an anti-choice activist before having an abortion. These examples represent just a tiny fraction of the anti-choice bills percolating through state legislatures.

Maybe this is all surprising. After all, haven’t we heard for the last two years that the Tea Party is more libertarian and less socially conservative? If you bought that line, congratulations — you’re ensconced in Beltway wisdom. The truth is that a new name for the same old conservative base hasn’t changed the nature of that base. Just as before, the “small government” conservatives and the religious right have a great deal of overlap. With gay rights waning as a powerful wedge issue, keeping the religious right motivated and ready to vote is harder than ever. Reproductive rights creates new incentives for church-organized activists to keep praying, marching, donating and, most important, voting for the GOP.

Amanda Marcotte is a freelance writer, a blogger, and the author of two books, “It’s a Jungle Out There” and “Get Opinionated.” You can follow her through her Twitter feed @amandamarcotte.

After not very much time weighing my options, I put in my notice at my day job and decided that I’d be happy to move to North Carolina. It wasn’t hard to see that this was a great opportunity and a chance to do what few people get to do, which is turn a hobby into a living. Or at least, to a degree. Pandagon was a personal blog, where I wrote in my own voice; clearly the blog for the Edwards campaign would be a campaign blog, where the campaign dictated the directions of my posts.

My main concern about the relationship between my personal blog and the campaign blog was that I wouldn’t have enough time to keep my personal blog updated as frequently as the readers had come to expect, a problem I solved by inviting other bloggers to join. I thought some about content concerns, but my opinion had always been that bloggers who work for campaigns should feel free to have personal blogs, so long as they disclosed their employment to their personal blog readers and refrained from using their personal blogs to bash other candidates.

“Reasonable people,” I thought, “can tell the difference between a personal blog post and those I’ll write for the campaign.” What I naively failed to understand was that there is no relationship between what reasonable people think and what will be used in a partisan bout of mud-slinging.

What I also failed to understand was how much McEwan and I would stick out. I was aware that I didn’t exactly fit the image people have of bloggers who join campaigns — the stereotype being 30-something nerdy young white men who wear khakis and obsess over crafting their Act Blue lists. I wasn’t aware that not fitting the image would attract so much negative attention. In fact, I mostly saw this all as a baby step in the direction of diversity, since McEwan and I differed from the stereotype mostly by being female and by being outspoken feminists.

I announced that I was taking the job on Jan. 30, and the same week, I noticed a small flare-up of oddly aggressive and misogynistic comments in my moderation queue over a short, irritated post I wrote about the coverage of the Duke lacrosse rape case on CNN. I assumed that some anti-feminist blogger had linked me and so, in frustration, I went and rewrote my by-then week-old post to mock the commenters by spelling out my views in childish, easy-to-understand language. This may have been the first indication that the right-wing noise machine had noticed me and was looking for something with which to hurt me and my new employers.

A few days after my announcement, another in a series of inept shitstorms in the right-wing blogosphere came to my attention. Some vocal conservatives were accusing me of “scrubbing” my posting history at Pandagon, apparently on the theory that I was trying to hide inflammatory material. The evidence for this accusation was that I had mockingly rewritten a one-paragraph post, but since that was clearly not enough to get a real shitstorm going, there was a bevy of wild accusations that I had deleted much of the archives of Pandagon. What the right-wingers had really discovered was a very different, embarrassing secret. With all our server and software changes over the years, we at Pandagon had hopelessly scrambled and in fact deleted months and even years of the blog by accident. Some blog posts had funky URLs; others had the wrong author. We’d never fixed the problem because no one could figure out a way to do it that didn’t involve thousands of manual corrections.

Danny Glover, the journalist who “broke” the missing posts story without ever calling or e-mailing me to ask where the posts went, apologized for his mistake. As far as I know, he’s the only person involved in the “scrubbing” smear who ever apologized for spreading inaccurate information. Other bloggers eagerly repeated the nonstory. Michelle Malkin admitted she was wrong but didn’t apologize, and then auditioned a new smear.

The allegations flung in the next few days varied wildly. Malkin tried to piece together a case that the Edwards campaign should fire me, because when she videotaped herself reading my blog posts in an alarming, screechy voice, they sounded alarming and screechy. Also, shockingly for a would-be Democratic staffer, I had often said negative things about Republicans on my blog. Dan Riehl apparently thought it would speed my firing if he suggested that I was not as hot as “American Pie” actress Shannon Elizabeth. Danny Glover, trying to recover from reporting the utterly unmysterious disappearance of some of my archives, tried to argue that I had failed to disclose my association with the Edwards campaign. The problem was the disclaimer at the top of Pandagon. (Now removed, since I no longer work for the Edwards campaign.)

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.

That two young feminist women were the targets of such a strenuous harassment campaign from bloggers and the Catholic League hints of more being at stake than scalp-collecting for conservatives. The posts that sent Donohue into a well-financed swoon were on topics such as the right to abortion, the right to contraception and gay rights. Donohue and the long list of culture warriors on the league’s board of advisors are dedicated to stomping out those very rights McEwan and I were defending. It’s unlikely they took issue with just the coarse, comedic vernacular that we used to defend those rights.

Regardless of its motive, the result of the smear campaign was to send a loud, clear signal to young feminist women. It tells them that campaigning for Democratic candidates, and particularly doing so in positions that would help the candidate connect with young feminist communities like the one that thrives in the blogosphere, is a scary, risky prospect. There are few things like having Bill O’Reilly work himself into a pearl-clutching fit while speaking your name over the air, or watching your in box fill to the brim with sexually violent, threatening e-mails. Young feminists certainly picked up on the message. As one wrote in a blog post tracking back to Pandagon, “I will never, ever go into any sort of actual work on any political campaign. I still might have to close off my original teenage wasteland-style blog. People will gleefully tear you apart any day of the week — but I’d rather not have that done to me over politics.”

When I was trying to decide whether to resign, no other concern weighed as heavy as the fear that resigning would tell the right-wing mob that harassing young feminists works. That would only encourage the hit squad in the future. As many commenters at Pandagon noted, we’re far from living in a postsexist era where feminism is not needed, if one can’t be an outspoken young feminist and work for a campaign without producing waves of outraged commentary. But in the end I decided it might be better for the campaign if I was no longer around to draw fire.

Whether or not it was the intention of the right-wing noise machine to throw more obstacles in the way of Democrats who want to play to their pro-choice, pro-gay rights feminist constituents — it’s also plausible that the right-wing noise machine was working on pure misogynist emotion — the episode has had a chilling effect on the future of Democratic outreach to feminist communities, particularly the younger ones that flock to computers for political information as earlier generations flocked to television sets and newspapers.

Equally alarming is the possibility that this episode was something of a test case for the right-wing noise machine. The right blogosphere is mostly a sideshow act for the Republican Party, providing a cheap source of noise and noncontroversies to help professional shills like the Catholic League and the Heritage Foundation degrade the political discourse in this country, throwing culture war bombs to cover up unpopular Republican policies like starting a war in Iraq.

I think the left blogosphere has a lot more substance to it. First of all, the liberal blogs are slowly but surely building a fundraising structure that is already beginning to have substantial influence on elections. They helped Jim Webb become a senator and Joe Lieberman become an Independent. Blogs also provide a method of disseminating progressive ideas to people, while the mainstream cable news channels carry on for weeks at a time on topics such as Anna Nicole Smith’s untimely demise. Liberal blogs are issue-oriented and good at parsing out complex ideas that don’t fit well into the sound-bite-driven mainstream discourse. They are a good fit for wonky Democrats. It’s therefore unsurprising that conservatives might want to dissuade Democrats from hiring them.

Does all this mean that it’s open season on bloggers who accept jobs as Democratic campaign staffers? It’s quite possible. As a general rule, blogs are raucous and common, as would be expected in any political environment that is truly democratic, where you don’t have to brandish a pedigree to get in the door. What this means is that even the more even-keeled bloggers are likely to have something in their archives that could be taken out of context and bandied about on the cable news networks. And even if the blogger herself never says a word that could be misconstrued, members of the right-wing noise machine are perfectly willing to dig through comment threads to find quotes that fit their purposes, as the bloggers at Feministing found out when Wendy McElroy was on Fox News quoting comments left by readers and implying that those statements had been made by the bloggers.

In response to what happened to Melissa and me, Garance Franke-Ruta has written a post on the American Prospect’s Tapped blog wagging her finger at liberal bloggers and warning us that unless we are willing to ape the language and habits of the D.C. insider crowd, we can expect never to be allowed through the gates. She probably has a point that bloggers can expect this sort of pushback from the establishment. Blogs are popular because they provide space for everyday citizens to engage in politics, in the language and manner that is comfortable for us, if not for the establishment. To my mind, however, it would be a terrible thing if bloggers did heed the advice to mind our manners and ape our betters if we want in, since this is supposed to be a democratic system that respects the right of everyday, common people to participate in politics. While there’s a chance that the crusade to separate McEwan and me from the Edwards campaign was just a singular happening, the possibility lingers that this was just the first sign that the established media and political circles will not be letting the blog-writing rabble into the circle without a fight.