‘Shut Up’ Is Not in Dornan’s Vocabulary

Now it goes without saying that three pages of anything uttered by virtually any member of Congress could put a colicky baby to sleep. But a recently published collection of quotations by Orange County Rep. Robert K. Dornan is 120 pages of rather riveting reading.

Its very title--”Shut Up, Fag!”--suggests the kind of rhetoric that made the Garden Grove congressman famous and that authors Nathan Callahan and William Payton believe will expose him as the “wildly unfocused” paranoid they think he is.

Just one thing: It wasn’t Dornan who hollered those words to a gay activist at an Orange County town forum. It was his wife, Sallie. The authors realized this, but reasoned that (A) it’s an awfully catchy title and (B) “If she hadn’t said it, he probably would have.”

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For years, Dornan has been considered one of the most outrageously outspoken members ever elected to Congress, a man who called one opponent a “sneaky little dirt bag,” who branded talk show host Phil Donahue “a boot-licking wimp,” whom the late House Speaker Tip O’Neill once suggested should see a psychiatrist and a man summed up by one vanquished rival as “nearly a lunatic.”

If there are those who say he’s dangerous, there are as many who find him refreshingly honest, who forcefully agree with his stand against abortion, the homosexual lifestyle and communism. He remains one of the biggest money-raisers in Congress. Donations pour in from all over the country, many of them from people who can’t even vote for him.

But after reading a paperback full of his opinions, one wonders whether any other legislator who dared mutter a fraction of what Dornan unabashedly booms on radio, TV and the House floor might find himself booted down the Capitol steps. After all, the casualty list of people in and out of politics who said just one wrong thing is long:

Michigan Gov. George Romney let it slip that he was brainwashed during a 1965 visit to Vietnam and ended his chance for the presidency; Earl Butz was forced to resign as President Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture for making a racist joke; Andy Rooney was suspended without pay from the CBS News program “60 Minutes” for offensive remarks to blacks and gays, and Jesse Jackson has never fully lived down “Hymietown.”

But Dornan pushes the envelope time and again with virtual immunity. When he said every “lesbian spear-chucker” in the country wanted to see him lose, he explained that he really meant to say “spear-carrier,” as in the iron-chested Wagnerian opera character Brunhilde. He says it was a slip of the tongue that caused him to call TV commentator Vladimir Posner a “disloyal betraying little Jew,” and even his harshest critics concede that he is anything but an anti-Semite.

Virtually all of the rest of what’s in the book, however, he meant:

Of President Clinton: “The Commander in Chief is jogging in San Francisco in his slit-up-the-sides silk girlie-girlie jogging pants showing us those beautiful white doughboy thighs of his.”

Of 1994: “It’s the Year of the Penis,” referring to the Bobbitts, the police photographing Michael Jackson’s private parts and Paula Jones’ allegations against President Clinton.

To a colleague wearing sunglasses at night on the House floor: “I feel like I’m in a Mexican nightclub.”

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A couple of times he has apologized. Once the House turned off his microphone. Otherwise, Dornan has mastered the art of speaking his mind with impunity.

“If (Senate Minority Leader) Bob Dole said those things he would be severely censured. He is responsible to the other Republicans in the Congress. Dornan is only responsible to his constituency,” said Stephen Hess, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Dornan answers to the electorate, not to a presidential Administration that might be embarrassed or a television station worried about ratings. And the electorate in his, the only Democratic district in conservative Orange County, continues to endorse its Republican congressman.

“Everyone knew I didn’t mean it,” Dornan said of the two times he misspoke. “I had the track record to back it up.”

Dornan says the book is backed by film director Oliver Stone, whom Dornan calls “a Bolshevik enemy.” Otherwise, he’s rather proud of his record as displayed in the book, an anthology of patriotic, God-loving eloquence--with the exception of that Year of the Penis stuff, said on a cable television comedy show. He regrets that. Sort of.

“It was Bob Dornan’s pathetic attempt at sit-down comedy. It was a mistake,” Dornan repented, pausing to add: “But it goes without saying, 1994 was the Year of the Penis.”