Andrew Sullivan says that I’m “highly intelligent and reasonable,” as well as “civilized,” even though I’m a “religious fundamentalist.” (I’m not a religious fundamentalist, actually, unless the term means “someone to Sullivan’s right on some social issues.”) But, he complains, with his customary rhetorical restraint, that the title of my book, The Party of Death, is “reprehensible”: “To call half the country ‘a party of death’ and to assign that label to one’s partisan political opponents is . . . . [demagogic] abuse.” Worse, Ann Coulter liked the book! (It’s true.) That someone as civilized, etc., as me should have sunk to this level is a sad sign of the decline of conservatism. Sullivan is very disappointed.

This more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger shtick would be easier to believe if Sullivan hadn’t devoted post after post, several weeks ago, to calling me a pathological liar and opportunist—even going so far as to run an anonymous email attacking my character from someone who (barely) knew me in college. How’s that for civility?

Sullivan also routinely calls a large percentage of Americans “Christianists” and then pretends that he’s not comparing them to Osama bin Laden. (He wasn’t comparing them to Islamists! He was comparing them to horticulturalists!) And yes, Sullivan is also the guy who called left-wingers a “fifth column” in the war on terrorism just after September 11, when one might have thought the nation could have used a little of that–what’s the word?–civility.

As Sullivan would know if he bothered to read the book—or even the introduction to it, or Chapter 7—the phrase “the party of death” doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. It is adapted from the liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, whose own book defending a right to abortion and euthanasia opens with the assertion that abortion and euthanasia are “choices for death.” Dworkin, like Peter Singer and many others, squarely faces the truth that abortion and euthanasia are deliberate choices to kill living members of the human species. They defend these choices, and the right to make these choices, in important part because the human beings killed by them are not “persons” with rights. My book argues against this mindset; argues that its implications are dangerous; and traces its influence in our law, politics, media, and culture.

That influence is much more pronounced in the Democratic party than the Republican party. That’s why I mention the Democratic party (along with two other institutions and an attitude) in the subtitle, and spend more time talking about the Democrats than the Republicans in the book. It’s why I also devote a chapter to pro-life Democrats. But when Republicans have succumbed to that influence, I criticize them, too.

I explain that membership in the party of death is a matter of degree, and that it has more unwitting allies than core members. A person who supports a right to abortion to avoid back-alley abortions isn’t Peter Singer—but, I argue in the book, nonetheless inadvertently promotes Singerism.

“Death” may be a blunt word, but it’s just silly to pretend that it doesn’t have something to do with the debates with which my book is concerned. The word “party” seems to trip more people up. (So far, at least, nobody has complained about the “of.” Give it time.) But there is ample precedent for the use of the word “party” to refer to something other than, say, the Democratic National Committee. I use the word “party” the same way Hayek used it in the phrase “the party of life” (he wasn’t referring to the Tories), Rochelle Gurstein used the phrase “the party of reticence” and “the party of exposure” (she wasn’t talking about Rs and Ds), and the way the Nation has used the phrase “the war party” (it wasn’t referring exclusively to Republicans).

This is the last time I’m going to waste talking about the title of my book, as opposed to its contents. But let me offer one suggestion: If you want to attack my book because of its title–and a misinterpretation of its title, at that–and because “the wrong people” like it, maybe you shouldn’t prattle on about intellectual standards.