Liberals resorting to bigotry, again.

This has to be the worst campaing season ever. People who resort to appeals to religious prejudice, whether it's the inane "Aqua Buddha" ad or the recent attempts to use Catholic imagery as an unspoken reason to vote against someon deserve to lose.  And now there's this "are you now or have you ever worked for a Catholic Diocese" strategy from Missouri.

Big Journalism has a post on an attempt to smear Missouri Congressional Candidate Ed Martin as a Catholic for purported involvement in the pedophilia scandal because - hey- all Catholics are guilty by definition. It appears that the site is funded by  Martin's opponent, Democrat candidate Russ Carnahan. 

Here is the site whose allegations appear to be that Martin worked for the Diocese between 1998 and 2001 and therefore must have been involved in alleged pedophilia that happened decades earlier.  The site finds great signficance in Martin's wedding invitation.

According to Big Journalism:

It must be asked: Is this what all reporters from CBS and NBC news are really like? How could an Emmy award-winning journalist and an Edward R Murrow award-winning journalist be reduced to such reprehensible actions? Did they try to push the story through the media and fail? Anderson Cooper had enough interest to call the local Fox channel for an investigation, but it wasn’t moving fast enough until Ed Martin called the press conference to get ahead of the smear. Add in the suspicious payments to a research department at the University of Arizona that researches speaking to the dead, and you get a very nasty, very under-handed, almost certainly illegal coordination hit piece, run by former Dateline journalists, and financed by Russ Carnahan’s re-election campaign.


This is the state of modern journalism. Handed the keys to a juicy story about an attack piece that failed, no media outlet was interested in discovering who was behind a blatant smear of Catholics and a congressional candidate. Once again, an unpaid blogger presented the evidence. It is our hope that the media finally reports on the matter, calling out their former comrades for conduct unbecoming of a professional journalist.

All of this, of course, merits not a second of interest in the media since anti-Catholicism is "the last acceptable prejudice.