Believe in the Flowers.

Carol of the Zombie Jesus!

Recently, the talented and insightful Heather Armstrong (AKA Dooce) wrote on her blog that she firmly believes any woman (or, really, any voter) who intends to vote for John McCain in November should reconsider their options (read the post in question here). She was relatively polite about the whole thing, if you take into account that it's her own damn blog, and she should have the right to talk about whatever she pleases as often as she pleases without suffering from the flack that is often thrown at bloggers who have gotten the opportunity to head to the mainstream with their own website and advertisement (of course, as we all now know, it is practically impossible for that poor woman to enjoy a moment of freedom on her own blog).

Anyway, I digress. The point is that Heather has the right to say or do whatever she wants on her blog. Many long-time readers have apparently gone out of their way to not only threaten to stop reading her blog, but to call her names and even threaten her personal well being. To call this "disturbing" is simply not descriptive enough, and too many of her readers have replied perfectly: individuals expecting only posts that are funny and never anything else are already grossly misled. Her sole purpose in life is not to entertain a specific group of people, but to have a place to share her views and experiences in parenthood - information that many of us have found not only useful but crucial - whatever they may be. It's a pity that she's being tortured like this, excommunicated from some of her fans because they refuse to read about politics on a personal blog. Well, tough; as Heather has said, politics matter to her right now, so she's going to blog about them. She's going to yell her opinions just as loudly as anyone else who isn't afraid to do so. She has proven that she welcomes other viewpoints and disagreement, but how is it fair to threaten her? So stop reading her blog. A few - maybe even a hundred - angry people who can't stand to see a woman empowered enough to make her views publically known aren't really going to change her livelihood. So why they've decided to threaten her openly is a point of contention to me - no doubt they're just trying to be malicious. Nobody's forcing them to read her blog or the political posts. I have absolutely no doubts in my mind that Heather is going to continue to make political statements because it's an important topic to her at the moment. This is true of a lot people, and I don't doubt that many blogs have been inundated with the attempts of many authors to explain their political standpoints.

TL;DR version:
People are treating Heather like crap for no reason. It's disturbing to think that people like them are allowed to intermingle with the more sane among us without some kind of locator device to ensure that the rest of us are safe while the lunatics are out threatening everybody else. I highly admire and respect the people who can state their opinion and disagree without being rude, crass, or threatening.

2 comments:

I personally took greater offense to the How To Cook Edamame video than the political posts. But maybe that was just me?

I applaud Heather for her voice, and for her encouragement to think through the decision about who you vote for. Everyone should at least triple guess themselves on that topic. After all it is the countries future, our future that we are looking at.

While I personally have made the decision to refrain from making political posts, mainly because it feels more like a school-yard girl fight than an election. It's a personal choice, and I applaud her for sticking to it.