Eduardo Penalver at Commonweal‘s blog had a fairly mild rebuke for Marcotte when the controversy started last week.  He was then quoted by Tom Donnelly at Faithful Democrats–it is worth noting that he quoted from that post entirely without comment. 

This Faithful Democrats site seems to be an annoyance to Matt Stoller at MyDD (via Blogometer), who does not even bother to notice that Mr. Donnelly is quoting Mr. Penalver’s earlier post from dotCommonweal (yes, that is the real name of their blog).  No, the “Faithful Democrats” must be taken down a peg for citing Penalver’s perfectly reasonable observations that Marcotte’s language was over the line and went well beyond criticism or disagreement with church teachings or dogma.  (Here is Chris Bowers, also of MyDD, peddling that particularly reprehensible misrepresentation of what Marcotte wrote.)  Here’s Stoller:

So it’s cool to Jesse Lava and Faithful Democrats to debate on the terrain set by anti-semites and homophobe?  Ok then.  Now I know that Faithful Democrats put a caveat in there about how Donahue isn’t a nice guy, but that’s really irrelevant.  This is very simple.  Donahue is using religion as cover for a political attack.  The only ethical response from anyone who actually opposes bigotry is ‘Donahue should be ignored because of his record’ or some variation thereof.  So until the self-described religious left decides to stop letting bigoted and extreme right-wingers talk for them, they are no different than the religious right they pretend to oppose. 

Fine, ignore Donohue.  I certainly do.  But what about Mr. Penalver and Mr. O’Dwyer and the Catholic Democrats and liberals whose views they claim to represent?  I can think of nothing that would better satisfy Stoller’s enemies than this sort of insane attack on the religious left.  By all means, declare war on religious liberals and convince them once and for all that the political left hates them intensely, so much so that their grassroots activists would throw a huge fit at the thought of seeing one of their own punished for her expressions of anti-Christian bigotry.  Better yet, convince them that if they should ever do anything so outrageous as object to having their religion trashed by an ignorant hack, the secular lefties will declare them to be no better than “right-wingers.”  Perhaps more than a few of them will draw the inevitable conclusion that it will be better to support and work for people who do not go out of their way to insult them and their beliefs.  Perhaps then there will not be much left of the religous left, and Stoller and his sort will be able to dictate to them with ease.  Meanwhile, the political fortunes of his party will tank and the buffoonish blog left will have itself partly to blame.