DORFMAN'S CAUTIONARY: Mea Krappa Culpa

From: Jonathan Dorfman
Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 12:02 PM
To: 'triley@artsjournal.com'
Subject: A few words

Tim:  Hope you/kids/Sara are well.  Love to get together soon.  Congratulations on the book: I’m sure that future comments will differ from those Grace Slick!  Screw Publisher’s Weekly!   I look forward to reading it, armed as I am with the recordings.

This isn’t a formal letter to your website—just some advice from a friend and a great admirer of you and your work.  I think you’ve opened yourself up to a storm of criticism this morning about Andrew Sullivan and his article on Tony Hendra.  For one, Sullivan is adamantly opposed to current Church practice on many areas—the Church abuse scandal, homosexual marriage, etc. etc., and he is by no means a Vatican drone.  For another, he’s been whacking the Bush administration regularly—on fiscal policy, incompetence on the war, Rumsfeld, Tenet, etc.

But the big thing on which you’ll be ripped is what many will take as anti-Catholic, anti-religious bigotry. Don’t get me wrong: there is an argument to be made against religion, including the Catholic Church, just not the argument you made.   You want Sullivan to recant his Catholicism.  Are religious beliefs a fever from which you should recant?  Replace “Catholic” with “Jewish” or “Moslem” or “Baptist (African-American)”, and you can see how many people could find that statement offensive.  And if one remains a Catholic, as in your criticism of Sullivan, is this on a par with remaining a racist or a thief or any other degraded state from which you are supposed to evolve?  So you also then will need to face the problem of explaining why so many saintly people are Catholic—for instance, Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker Movement.  And one last thing: just because Andrew Sullivan is gay is no reason why his opinions should be any less suspicious than if he were not.  The whole point of fairness is to look at the person, not his sexuality, or his race, or his religion.

Anyway, I don’t mean to hector you, just to caution you about the need to rebut the sort of arguments I’ve just made, and which you’ll might get.   As your friend, I’d hate to see you portrayed in ways that could create problems for you.

All best: Jon

Dear JD,

Fair enough, Dorfman. Sara chides me about my anti-Catholic bias all the time, and I was just trying to be funny, in haste: raised Episcopalian, I simply try to fling superiority towards Catholics as they tend to fling it towards everybody else. A not very flattering case of enjoying their hurricane season. Clearly, this can be taken wrong. I admire Sullivan's brash brand of gay Catholic politics even if I think he was late in discovering Bush to be a moral fraud. And I distrust his Hendra review to the extent that its over-the-top endorsement revealed more Catholic bias than it intended: would he have raved as much about this memoir nearly as much if Hendra was mentored by a Muslim or a Buddhist? I sincerely doubt it, and that's all I meant. But you're right: swap out the terms and I sound pretty bigoted.

Have you read Hendra's book? Yours is the opinion I'd really value on it...

more soon, and thanks for the advice, Tim