Penalver on the Edwards Blog Flap

Our fellow Mirror of Justice blogger Eduardo Penalver is quoted on the flap over the allegedly anti-Catholic bloggers hired by the John Edwards for President campaign:

"We're completely invisible to this debate," said Eduardo Penalver, a Cornell University law professor who writes for the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal. He said he was dissatisfied with the Edwards campaign's response. "As a constituency, the Christian left isn't taken all that seriously," Penalver said. ...

In a comment that several Catholic Democrats told The Politico they found particularly offensive, Edwards aide Amanda Marcotte wrote, in a posting to her personal blog, on "What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?"

The other Edwards blogger, Melissa McEwan, has come under fire for referring to Christian conservatives as “Christofascists” in her personal blog.

Thursday, the campaign issued a statement from Edwards saying that he had been personally offended by the remarks and that the bloggers "have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word."

...  “I thought his explanation was not satisfying," said Cornell's Penalver. "It's obvious that they did mean to give offense."

"You imagine a similar kind of comment directed at the Jewish community or at the gay community – something at this level of intentional offensiveness -- and I have a hard time believing it gets resolved in the same way," he said.

(X-posted from PB.com)