Bill Donahue And the DNC

Bruce McQuain at Q&O:

Bill Donahue of the “Catholic League” is demanding that certain “credentialed blogs” covering the Democratic Convention be cut from the list for being “offensive” to Catholics.

“The list of credentialed blogs include radical sites like The Daily Kos. Worse are blogs that feature anti-Catholic and obscene material. The two most offensive are Bitch Ph.D. and Towleroad.

Donahue goes on to describe what constitutes their offensive conduct and why they should be “nixed” from the list.

I’m not going to link to them because I share Donahue’s assessment. For the most part they are not the type of blog I would put on my reader, mostly for the reasons he lists.

However.

You knew there had to be a “however”.

However, the last thing I want to see are demands such as Donohue’s taken seriously for either convention.

How many times have we seen the same kind of play against people ostensibly of the right wing, where the left has bitched up a blue streak about it? say, Bill Kristol, and Coulter, the occasional Limbaugh spout, and so on. It’s the same game on their side as it is on ours. The major difference is that their side has very little in the way of shame, and therefore can’t be shamed out of its offensive writers. Certainly, if the Democrats took the value structure of Mr. Donohue and his organization anywhere near seriously, they denounced such sites as he complains about, and such writers a long time ago.

Bruce , you know as well as I do how this thing gets played. Donahue makes those demands, knowing full well that the Democrats are not going to take it seriously. The bigger value in making those demands, is in loudly linking the Democratic Party to those offensive sites. In the end, I think that’s the point that Donohue is making. He is making use of a trick the left has been using for decades; claiming offense to draw a negative attention to a particular group of people. Surreptitious, yet highly effective.

Donahue is not asking for governmental involvement in the silencing of what he thinks are the offending writers, (and for the record I, too, agree with his assessment) he’s asking for the Democrats to have the kind of standards that Henke was complaining about the other day, and deal with the problem exclusive to government, whereas I submit the Democrats would be screaming for governmental involvement as a first line of defense. Can you say “fairness doctrine”?

And also for the record I have no problem on that level with religious groups making such statements, long as they don’t have the backing of the government purely because they ARE religious groups, that is. That seems to me the context Donahue is operating in and frankly I have no problem with it in that context. They have the same right as any other group to express their views.