What I want from Hot Air: a comment policy that, after a warning, would involve the deletion of posts that are clearly designed to troll for religious fights, with eventual banning. If they want to be a mainstream conservative blog, then they're going to learn the hard way that religious bigots cannot be allowed to take control of their comment threads.
It seems as if every comment thread involving the Pope, or religion in general, turns into a Catholic bashing thread by the bigots there. Notwithstanding that Ed Morrissey is a Catholic, and Michelle Malkin might be Catholic but is at least Christian, the bigots run the show at Hot Air. A basic rule of thumb: if the post has anything to do with religion, the Pope, abortion, or sex - it will always eventually turn into a Catholic bashing thread (perhaps with a little anti-Mormonism if Mitt Romney happens to be mentioned).
So the excerpts I'm posting here really aren't out of the ordinary. It's just the stuff I could find in my free time. This sort of stuff happens so often that it's obvious they know of this problem.
They either refuse to acknowledge the problem, or do not care about the problem, or hope that it can be ignored by others who do not read the blog's comments. That is why I am going to expose all of them. If they are not shamed, then they can own these comments. If they think there's nothing wrong with a popular conservative blog hosting these vile comments, let them defend it. One day, someone bigger than me is going to take notice. And by then, I'll have hundreds of these posts in the "Hot Air Bigots" category.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
18 comments:
Hi Sydney,
I am a poster over at Laura Ingraham's site, and many of us are practicing Catholics. I agree that Hot Air is an enormously bigoted place and something needs to be done.
Are you planning to send Michelle or Ed an email or something. I'm sure I can rustle up some support from some of the posters over at LIs site.
Great work on getting all of this together. It is compelling evidence of bigotry and Allahpundit is flying real close to the sun right now as far as I'm concerned.
Excellent work Sydney. Hot Air is too important a site for conservatives to allow deranged anti-Catholic bigots to turn it into their playground. Malkin should have lowered the boom on them long ago.
Ed banned me without warning two weeks ago for commenting on one of his columns against funding Planned Parenthood. I wrote that all government funds to the Catholic church and related organizations should be banned if the test was covering up child molesting because the Catholic church had a far higher incidences than PP and because priests were the ones doing the molesting.
He called me a bigot, which ticked me off.
I think you're just upset about the anti-Catholic comments because you and Ed really can't defend some of them.
Given what appears to be an organizational mandate to violate state reporting requirements for statutory rape and child abuse, the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations should get stripped of all government funding for any of its activities. This amendment doesn’t cut off funds for health activities; it restores some long-overdue accountability for the Catholic Church’s lawless behavior, supported by such funding in the past.
-Fixed it for you, Ed.
jim m on March 5, 2009 at 5:56 PM
Jim M - anti-Catholic bigot
There, I fixed it for you.
The constant childish digs at my faith are lame and off-topic. When the Catholic Church starts receiving hundreds of millions of dollars a year from DC in grants, then come back and trot out your Jack Chick mentality in the comments section. Until then … buh-bye, troll.
Ed Morrissey on March 5, 2009 at 6:43 PM
------
You want to explain how my post was bigoted? Or was it simply because Ed couldn't answer the question so he decided to ban me? [And, by the way, Catholic hospitals do get about $90 billion a year in funding from the state and federal governments.]
And here's a definition of bigot: "big·ot (bgt)
n.
One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ."
I don't think some of the comments you're complaining about are necessarily bigoted.
Glad you were banned Jim M. I hope you are just one of many anti-Catholic bigots at Hot Air that Ed gives the heave ho to.
You wanna explain how my post was bigoted?
Jim,
If a premiere conservative blog wants to become known as a place where Catholics must constantly battle over questions regarding their faith, irrespective of the merits of such questions, that's a problem because it indicates a conservative intolerance towards Catholics even if not bigoted.
However, the comments at Hot Air go far beyond mere questions, and involve open hostility. In your case, it's clear that your representation that the Catholic Church has an organizational mandate in favor of child rape is disgusting. But don't worry, I'll check that thread later tonight to see if there were other instances of your views of Catholicism which resulted in your termination there.
Frankly, what shocks me is that you were banned at all.
Donald,
Thank you. I'm just tired of it all. I read Hot Air a lot and this problem has annoyed me for a long time now. I guess I just had enough of it yesterday.
Maybe I'll post about other things on this blog too. I can only post at night when I get home from work - I'm not a "full time" blogger at all!
Just stopped visiting Hot Air becuase of this.
Sydney, I simply took what Ed wrote about Planned Parenthood and substituted the Catholic Church and Catholic organizations for PP. If Ed can describe PP as having an "organizational mandate" to not report for 5 or 6 violations, then how can he say that the Catholic Church didn't have the same mandate given the thousands that it initially didn't report.
I think Ed was having a bad day.
Thanks, Sydney. I've noticed this as well. It's truly embarrassing that a conservative website could draw so many anti-Catholic nutjobs. I don't for a second believe they are anywhere near a majority of the commentariat, but there are enough of them to avoid the comments section - kind of like I avoid any post bylined Allahpundit.
Sydney, in regard to jim m, here is one of his comments at Hot Air:
“If God had thought abortion was murder, then why didn’t He say so more clearly in the Bible? He apparently thought it was significant enough in the Old Testament to tell people what types of clothes they could wear and what types of food they could eat, yet no explicit mention of abortion?
As to you Orthodox Catholics, if you don’t like what’s going on in the US, why don’t you move to Vatican City?
jim m on February 18, 2009 at 11:19 AM”
Faithful Catholics get out, doesn't quite have the ring of "Raus Juden", but the message is the same.
The message is not the same. And my response was to someone who wanted the US to have more Catholic policies.
The Vatican has Catholic policies. If you want to move to a country with Catholic policies, then you should move to there.
Do you think it was bigoted to tell Democrats four years ago to move to Canada if they didn't approve of the US' policies?
And it continues:
From the thread about Hillary's gaffe re: Our Lady of Guadalupe:
http://hotair.com/archives/2009/03/28/obamas-not-the-only-amateur-apparently/comment-page-2/#comments
So what?
Often the day-laborers leave a urine stain on a wall and the local priests show up to declare it a vision of their “Queen of Heaven” as proof AMNESTY should be granted to these criminals. What a failed people, culture, religion, and country!!!!!
RealDemocrat on March 28, 2009 at 4:14 PM
From the same thread:
you know if it wasn’t mary, it could have been someone else…she wasn’t chosen because of some special merit or power she had.
whatever you’re preaching, it ain’t christianity…in christianity you cannot ‘earn’ a spot in heaven…Jesus earned it for us…and He is the ONLY ONE who could..
right4life on March 28, 2009 at 7:25 PM
AND:
Most heathen religions always have their own “Queen of Heaven”. I can’t think of one heathen religion that doesn’t.
RealDemocrat on March 28, 2009 at 7:39 PM
Sydney,
I stopped reading Hot Air three years ago because of the bigotry. You want to know why? Well this will explain why the anti-Catholic nutjobs congregate there.
AllahPundit himself is an anti-Catholic bigot. He had a couple of postings and his own comments reflected an anti-Catholic theme in them. I tried notifying AllahPundit several times via email and he never responded.
So I stopped reading it and eventually dropped HotAir from my blogroll.
You know... I never understood the whole "if it wasn’t mary, it could have been someone else" argument.
Clearly Jesus could have entered the world any way He wanted to. But we also know that the way He would ordain is the best way. He chose to come into the world through a woman and the woman He created to be His mother was Mary.
What's the issue?
Post a Comment