Catholic group calls on Edwards to fire 'bigots' on staff

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Catholic group calls on Edwards to fire 'bigots' on staff

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two bloggers hired recently by Democratic
presidential candidate John Edwards were criticized Tuesday by a
Catholic group for posts they had written elsewhere on the Internet.

Bill
Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil
Rights, demanded that Edwards fire Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan.

"John
Edwards is a decent man who has had his campaign tarnished by two
anti-Catholic, vulgar, trash-talking bigots," Donohue wrote in a
statement. "He has no choice but to fire them immediately."

The Edwards campaign declined to comment. McEwan and Marcotte did not respond to e-mails requesting a response.

Donohue
cited posts that the women made on blogs in the past several months in
which they criticized the pope and the church for its opposition to
homosexuality, abortion and contraception, sometimes using profanity.

"The
Catholic church is not about to let something like compassion for girls
get in the way of using the state as an instrument to force women to
bear more tithing Catholics," Marcotte wrote on the blog Pandagon on
December 26, in an excerpt cited by Donohue.

Among the McEwan
posts that Donohue listed was one she posted on February 21, 2006, on
her site, Shakespeare's Sister. She questioned what religious
conservatives don't understand about "keeping your noses out of our
britches, our beds and our families?"