US: Andrew Sullivan quits blogging at The Dish
Andrew Sullivan, one of America’s highest-profile gay conservative bloggers, has announced that he intends to stop writing at The Dish, the independent website he’s run for the past two years.
In a post on Wednesday Mr Sullivan mentioned “two” reasons for the decision.
He wrote: “I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.
“The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms.”
Mr Sullivan, a regular pundit on US news shows, also cited health reasons as part of his decision.
“I’ve had increasing health challenges these past few years,” he wrote. “They’re not HIV-related; my doctor tells me they’re simply a result of fifteen years of daily, hourly, always-on-deadline stress. These past few weeks were particularly rough – and finally forced me to get real.”
A former editor of The New Republic, Mr Sullivan founded his The Daily Dish blog in 2000 and it quickly became one of the most popular political blogs in the United States.
He moved the blog between a number of websites including Time, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast before switching to an independent, subscription-based format in 2013.
Mr Sullivan is known for his outspoken views.
In October last year he claimed that “almost every man” hates using condoms.
Despite being a long-time supporter of same-sex marriage, last April, Mr Sullivan said he was “appalled” at the resignation of Firefox CEO Brendan Eich, who quit over backlash to his previous support for anti-gay marriage campaigners in California.
He wrote: “The guy who had the gall to express his First Amendment rights and favour Prop 8 in California by donating $1,000 has just been scalped by some gay activists.”
The journalist has also written against the passing of hate crime laws, arguing they restrict free speech.
Mr Sullivan’s Burkean conservativism is rooted in his British Catholic background and in the political philosophy of his mentor, Michael Oakeshott.
Born and raised in England, he has lived in the United States since 1984 and currently resides in Washington.
He married his husband Aaron Tone in the state of Massachusetts in 2007.
