{"id":398,"date":"2004-06-03T08:33:10","date_gmt":"2004-06-03T12:33:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp\/2004\/06\/dorfmans_cautionary_mea_krappa\/"},"modified":"2004-06-03T08:33:10","modified_gmt":"2004-06-03T12:33:10","slug":"dorfmans_cautionary_mea_krappa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/2004\/06\/dorfmans_cautionary_mea_krappa\/","title":{"rendered":"DORFMAN’S CAUTIONARY: Mea Krappa Culpa"},"content":{"rendered":"

From: Jonathan Dorfman

\nSent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 12:02 PM

\nTo: ‘triley@artsjournal.com’

\nSubject: A few words


\nTim:\u00a0 Hope you\/kids\/Sara are well.\u00a0 Love to get together soon.\u00a0 Congratulations on the book: I\u2019m sure that future comments will differ from those Grace Slick!\u00a0 Screw Publisher\u2019s Weekly!\u00a0\u00a0 I look forward to reading it, armed as I am with the recordings.


\nThis isn\u2019t a formal letter to your website\u2014just some advice from a friend and a great admirer of you and your work.\u00a0 I think you\u2019ve opened yourself up to a storm of criticism this morning about Andrew Sullivan and his article on Tony Hendra.\u00a0 For one, Sullivan is adamantly opposed to current Church practice on many areas\u2014the Church abuse scandal, homosexual marriage, etc. etc., and he is by no means a Vatican drone.\u00a0 For another, he\u2019s been whacking the Bush administration regularly\u2014on fiscal policy, incompetence on the war, Rumsfeld, Tenet, etc.


\nBut the big thing on which you\u2019ll be ripped is what many will take as anti-Catholic, anti-religious bigotry. Don\u2019t get me wrong: there is an argument to be made against religion, including the Catholic Church, just not the argument you made.\u00a0 \u00a0You want Sullivan to recant his Catholicism.\u00a0 Are religious beliefs a fever from which you should recant?\u00a0 Replace \u201cCatholic\u201d with \u201cJewish\u201d or \u201cMoslem\u201d or \u201cBaptist (African-American)\u201d, and you can see how many people could find that statement offensive.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 So you also then will need to face the problem of explaining why so many saintly people are Catholic\u2014for instance, Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker Movement. \u00a0And 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.\u00a0 The whole point of fairness is to look at the person, not his sexuality, or his race, or his religion.
\n


\nAnyway, I don\u2019t mean to hector you, just to caution you about the need to rebut the sort of arguments I\u2019ve just made, and which you\u2019ll might get.\u00a0 \u00a0As your friend, I\u2019d hate to see you portrayed in ways that could create problems for you.


\nAll best: Jon


\nDear JD,


\nFair 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<\/A>‘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.

\n

\nHave you read Hendra’s book? Yours is the opinion I’d really value on it…
\n


\nmore soon, and thanks for the advice, Tim<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From: Jonathan Dorfman Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 12:02 PM To: ‘triley@artsjournal.com’ Subject: A few words Tim:\u00a0 Hope you\/kids\/Sara are well.\u00a0 Love to get together soon.\u00a0 Congratulations on the book: I\u2019m sure that future comments will differ from those Grace Slick!\u00a0 Screw Publisher\u2019s Weekly!\u00a0\u00a0 I look forward to reading it, armed as I am with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/riley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}