Connoisseurs of sophistry and politicized intellectual mendacity will find a lot to occupy them in “Going Down Screaming,” the seven-thousand-word blast against contemporary American conservatism by Andrew Sullivan that appeared as the cover story in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, October 11. Mr. Sullivan, a clever English journalist who was editor of The New Republic for several years in the 1990s, has always thrived on contradiction. He first emerged on the scene as a transplanted Tory Catholic who was also homosexual. He left the editorship of The New Republic a few years ago because he had contracted AIDS. Since then, he has been on an increasingly shrill campaign to legitimate this year’s favorite oxymoron, “gay marriage.”

We mention these biographical details because they form the unspoken theme of “Going Down Screaming.” Mr. Sullivan does not declare his sexual allegiances in thi ...

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