I agree with everything you said on this thread. (Imagine that!)

Richard,

North Carolina is very much a part of the Bible Belt. For a candidate to voice what you have pointed out (even if that is what she believed) could make a difference between winning and losing the election. Shouldn’t we remember the important fact that a candidate has to first be elected in order to start making changes, however slight?

I’m just saying that Hagan response implicitly agrees with anti-atheist bigotry.

I really do not see that. I agree that the response from Hagan’s campaign wasn’t necessarily the most virtuous response, but it was, as far as I can see, the most pragmatic.
The last thing that Kay Hagan wants to do is fight an election on the subject of religion or lack thereof. Senator Dole introduced it as a distraction from real issues. It might be wrong not to correct the wrongness in the attack, but in this case, it would be even more wrong to get off the topic of the real issues that people care about when voting, which are the reasons why Hagan, I have no doubt, is running for office in the first place.
Shorter version: Do not feed the trolls.

Itd be different if she wasnt “connected” in this small way to godless activists, but now she has to be extra careful or people will start to wonder if Dole does have a point.

That’s just flat out false; there is no such implicit approval, and she just explicitly denied it and explicitly stated disapproval of that suggestion.

And this is flat-out nonsense. You do understand that “implicit” means “not explicit”? You don’t determine if someone is implicitly saying something by asking them if they’re explicitly saying that.

To me, that makes you a fool who can’t make distinctions. First, Hagan has many differences from Dole that make Dole worse. Second, it’s just a bad move politically to take money from a group with that name — that doesn’t show that Hagan is bad, it shows that “Godless American” is viewed negatively by voters.

No, it’s you who don’t get it. It is libel and defamation because it hurts her chances of winning the election — that’s the whole point of Dole’s ad. The law is based on whether there is harm, and there is; that the harm is a result of people having negative views of atheists is beside the point. As an atheist, I find it disappointing that there are so many irrational atheists who can’t understand this simple point.

The response is unconvincing. Hagan did “implicit[ly approve] of Sen. Dole’s suggestion that atheists. . .are bad people,” when she responded solely by denying that she was an atheist, without also responding to the idea that atheists are bad people.

That’s just flat out false; there is no such implicit approval, and she just explicitly denied it and explicitly stated disapproval of that suggestion.

Suppose Dole had said that Kay Hagan had taken money from Jewish groups

You can’t change what is false to something true by changing what did happen to something very different. What Dole did was claim that Hagan, who teaches Sunday school and is a church deacon, doesn’t believe in God. Dole’s ad lied and claimed that Hagan lacks a belief that she actually has. It doesn’t matter that we atheists don’t have or think much of that belief, or that Dole attacked us, Hagan did not. To claim that she attacked us is just another lie.