To: Jonathan Ames
From: Amanda Marcotte
Subject: I Really Do Hate Religion as Much as Bill O’Reilly Says

Dear Jonathan,

My Raison d'blog: Online lefty Steve GilliardI can’t be too saucy about The News Blog this week. Steve Gilliard has been a huge influence on my blogging over the years and I’ve met him in person, so his recent illness troubles me on a personal level. Steve’s in the 99th percentile of bloggers in terms of basic common political sense, so I miss his blogging terribly.

That said, it’s heartening to see all the people donating strong, interesting blog posts. When I started blogging, there wasn’t really any concept of guest blogging, but nowadays it’s expected, much like having someone feed your pets while you’re gone. On the surface, it seems like there’s no reason to do it, since the whole point of blogs is at-will publishing, and not at all like a newspaper with deadlines and column space to fill. But if you blog for any time at all, it makes perfect sense. You really get a sense of how your readers refresh the page multiple times a day, praying for interesting new content, and you begin to feel, well, much like you have a hungry pet to feed.

That or you don’t want your traffic to dwindle while you’re gone.

The Revealer is one of those blogs I keep meaning to add to my insanely thick RSS reader and then I don’t do it. I really should, because every time someone sends me a link from them, I’m pumping my fist in the air and saying, “Hells yeah!” Because I really do hate religion as much as Bill O’Reilly says, and possibly more, even more than I hate cute pictures of babies with bowls of spaghetti dumped over their heads. Naturally, there’s an intellectual veneer to the relentless liberal bigotry.

Rogue Catholic Emmanuel MilingoThis article, for instance, purports to be an examination of the life of rogue Catholic Archbishop-cum-Moonie Emmanuel Milingo, but I’m sure a determined right wing nut could detect loathsome anti-Catholic bigotry as the motivation for this piece, especially if it were politically expedient to do so.

If it wasn’t the week of SXSW here in Austin, I would probably feel more longing to get out of our more slow-paced city and into New York when I read Maud Newton and The Gothamist. (Though Maud is apparently a home girl of sorts, being as she is from Dallas.) How much am I in love with this story about an errant penis snuck into an illustration in the first printing of Huck Finn? Good to see the sneaky penis tradition predates the Little Mermaid scandal by a good century.

As a proper paranoid feminist, I have to point out that it serves our phallic-worshipping culture right. You put symbolic penises everywhere for people to ogle and eventually someone’s going to think it’s funny to put some more literal penises ones out there.

I disagree with Daphne Merkin. I think there should be more, not fewer, Jewish websites with really terrible puns in the name. Religion drives far too many wedges between people, and here we have an excellent opportunity to draw people together in the shared joy of groaning while trying to suppress juvenile snickers at silly puns.

I like Jewlicious already, since they engage in what I hear is my favorite bloodsport, taking angry swipes at institutional Catholicism. Granted, the real beef isn’t with church doctrine so much as with some German bishops who made comments comparing the Warsaw Ghetto with a ghetto in Ramallah, without taking the time to remember that these sort of comments sound especially bad coming from German Catholics. Still, I appreciate this dust-up as a classic in the genre of the culture clashes and non-apologies the rise up when there’s a steady hum of strong religious differences in the background.

Amanda