There's a strange piece of reasoning in today's Guardian by Giles Fraser. The nub of it is that Salman Rushdie should perhaps stick to what he does best, which is writing novels, rather than giving out opinions as a newspaper columnist. For the novel 'is pluralism in action'; it's 'a sacred space where all voices need to be heard'.
Well, I'm not going to quarrel with that characterization of one of the values of the novel. However, Giles Fraser is himself the vicar of Putney, and he's writing this in a newspaper column. He's aware of the point, for he says:
Columnists are often too busy attacking their opponents to make the time to inhabit their space. Mea culpa. It's a failing in a priest, but even more so in a novelist.But why more so? Novelists don't lose their rights as citizens, after all. Even if no novelist should presume that being one automatically lends his or her voice some greater authority, there seems no reason why they should have to refrain from putting their views on this and that, including views of a fairly definite sort, out in the public domain.