As some people might know, Amanda Marcotte resigned from John Edwards campaign (for those who don't you can get some idea by starting here and following the links around; I couldn't easily find any good summary of it
For those who don't know her, Amanda Marcotte is an atheist/feminist/liberal who writes material which is highly offensive to anyone who disagrees with her. What really struck me, though, wasn't the degree to which her writing is impolite.
Politeness is only worth so much, especially politeness to people who aren't in the room. At the end of the day, those of us who disagree are all working at cross purposes and as far as we can all tell, everyone else is making the world a worse place because they're acting on bad information. There's only so nice you can be to people who are making the world worse, even if they're doing their best. I can respect people who think that I'm evil and say so, though of course I wouldn't be likely to invite them over to dinner. (I don't mean that they aren't fit subjects for charity; if they were naked I would give them clothing; I just mean that discussing how bad we are wouldn't be very entertaining.)
No, what gets me about Amanda Marcotte is how badly she misunderstands those she disagrees with. To whit, one of her famous posts:
Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?
A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.
This is just plain stupid. Granted, it's more trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive than trying to be accurate, but it's on par with an anti-evolution joke about someone's mother evolving from a gold fish — the only way that you can say something this nonsensical is by either not caring at all what you're saying (which is probably the case here; she reads like an angry child trying to lash out at the grown-ups that it's far too small to hurt), or by not understanding what you're criticizing at all.
It doesn't make any sense to talk about Mary taking plan B, as she was explicitly given a choice as to whether she would become pregnant with God. This is, incidentally, why Catholics reverence her so much — if she had said no, Christianity would never have happened. Her choice, which she was free to make differently, saved the world.
More illustrative is this more recent one:
The Christian version of the virgin birth is generally interpreted as super-patriarchal, where god is viewed as so powerful he can impregnate without befouling himself by touching a woman, and women are nothing but vessels.
Here Marcotte is actually trying to explain, and shows how thoroughly badly she misunderstands Christianity. At best she only somewhat misunderstands the manichaen heresy. Claiming that this is the Christian version of the virgin birth is simply ludicrous. How the God who created Mary's vagina would befoul himself through touching it, when it's his power which maintains its existence, needs some explaining. The entire point of the story of the virgin birth of Jesus is that God does not despise his creation; God humbled himself so far as to ask one of his creatures for permission to be born of her. And not just any creature, but a poor member of a group which was fairly well despised by the rich and powerful of the world. And not only was he born of her, he was born in a cave among the animals.
The entire point of the virgin birth of Christ is not only that God does not despise his creation, but that he positively cherishes the lowest of it. The point of the story is that the humble shall be exalted. The point is that God loves everything, even that which most people despise. Even when human beings avert their eyes in horror, God looks on the world and sees that it is good.
But it does occur to me that this mistake is a little more natural if you think that the point of sex is a penis in a vagina, and children are only a side-effect. If sex is first and foremost pleasant rubbing, then it's not so odd to ask why God bypassed it. It's only if you think that sex's purpose is procreation does the question of why God didn't use a penis to impregnate Mary make no sense.