..like Ramesh Ponnuru.

I have wondered if the title of Ponnuru’s book might be a mistake of sorts, even though the broader point is clear once you start reading the book. Party of Death, although it does mean something broader than the Dems, runs the risk of getting the conversation started in the wrong direction, right off, because while politics are an element of the argument, they are only a part. The "Party of Death" includes, as I said below, all sorts of people – activists, medical professionals, pundits, and so on.

So we have today, Andrew Sullivan venting about Ramesh’s book, which he has not read.…but then, in re-reading the post, I see that it’s not the association with the dems he’s upset about, it’s the characterization of that viewpoint as a "party of death:"

It is one thing to argue that you are pro-life, to use the positive aspects of language to persuade. It is another to assert that people who differ from you are somehow "pro-death," (especially when they may merely be differing with you on the moral status of a zygote or the intricacies of end-of-life care). To smear an entire political party, and equate only one party with something as fundamental as life, is a new low in the descent of intellectual conservatism from Russell Kirk to Sean Hannity

As I’ve said, Ponnuru’s book is closely argued and those arguments are supported. What he confronts, and asks the reader to confront is the point at which the complex questions of intricate matters become a cover for something else, and simply inviting the reader to follow everything through, logically.

Let’s put it this way. The, er…party of…what – I don’t know – gets on the train – it doesn’t stop.  It doesn’t go back. The activists driving the train are pretty much totally uninterested in protecting life. It’s just not a value that they value. Choice, independence, autonomy all supercede life, although the logic of how that could be is unclear (how is right to choose even a right if your life isn’t protected and respected?).

This is Ramesh’s point – to cut through the cant. The way it works on the ground is this: Abortion rights supporters are uninterested in saving children from abortion. They support the rights of women to pay people to kill them.

If that’s not a party of death, I am not sure what is.

The book needs to be read and addressed seriously – and the question answered: whose life merits protection? Why? Why not? And what are you doing about? Where do you stand?

Oh, and what got me going here was this religious fundamentalist business, because that’s what Sullivan calls Ponnuru – says his "religious fundamentalism alarms me."

What’s religious fundamentalism? Simply believing what your faith teaches? Seems that way…

Oh, and by the way, as we’ve noted before, there are two books coming out in the near future on the subject of abortion and Democrats – one by Mark Stricherz, who actually comments on Sullivan (and Rush Limbaugh)’s reception of the book here:

They see the work, understandably, as an attack on the Democratic Party for its cultural stands.  Mr. Limbaugh in a blurb for the book writes that the author "tells the story of how the Democrats became the party of abortion-on-demand and euthanasia, and lost the support of most Americans in the process." Mr. Sullivan in a post yesterday wrote, "To call half the country ‘a party of death’ and to assign that label to one’s partisan political opponents is…not an invitation to dialogue. It’s demagogic abuse."

What’s clear is that neither man has read the book; Mr. Sullivan acknowledged as much in his post. The Party of Death is, as I will try to show in my upcoming review of the book for The New York Sun, partisan. But only about 35 of its 248 pages deal with pro-choice Democrats. The vast majority of the book is not political in the traditional sense.

But, as I said, I think Sullivan’s objection only begins with the Democrat issue, and extends to entire argument – it’s not right, he says, to call the opponents of the right to life a "party of death."

Well, okay.