IGF CultureWatch

First appeared in Reason, November 1998.

FOR CONNOISSEURS OF SURREALISM on the American Right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards". The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death.

Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment�which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution would include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned�a rather abrupt way for the Clinton presidency to end.

Mainstream outlets like the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post are finally starting to take note of the influence Rushdoony and his followers have exerted for years in American conservative circles. But a second part of the story, of particular interest to readers of this magazine, is the degree to which Reconstructionists have gained prominence in libertarian causes, ranging from hard-money economics to the defense of home schooling. "Christian economist" Gary North, Rushdoony's son-in-law and star polemicist of the Reconstructionist movement, is widely cited as a spokesman for free markets, if not exactly free minds; he even served for a brief time on the House staff of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), the Libertarian Party presidential nominee in 1988, when Paul was a member of Congress in the '70s. For his part, Rushdoony has blandly described himself to the press as a critic of "statism" and even as a "Christian libertarian." Say what?

An outgrowth of Calvinism, modern Reconstructionism can be traced to Rushdoony's 1973 magnum opus, Institutes of Biblical Law. (Many leading Reconstructionists emerged from conservative Presbyterianism, but as with so much of today's religious ferment, the movement cuts across denominational lines.) Not one to pursue a high public profile, Rushdoony has set up his Chalcedon Institute in off-the-beaten-path Vallecito, California, while North runs his Institute for Christian Economics out of Tyler, Texas.

As a "post-millennialist" school of thought, Reconstructionism holds that believers should work toward achieving God's kingdom on earth in the here and now, rather than expect its advent only after a Second Coming of Christ. Some are in a bit of a hurry about it, too. "World conquest," proclaims George Grant, in what by Reconstructionist standards is not an especially breathless formulation. "It is dominion we are after. Not just a voice not just influence not just equal time. It is dominion we are after."

Well, OK, it's easy to laugh. Yet grandiosity does sometimes gets results, especially when combined with an all-out conviction that one is historically predestined to win (the Communist Party in the '30s comes to mind). Reconstructionism has a record of turning out hugely prolific writers, tireless organizers who stay at meetings until the last chair is folded up, and driven activists willing to undergo arrest (Reconstructionist Randall Terry founded Operation Rescue, the lawbreaking anti-abortion campaign) to make their point.

Politically, Reconstructionists have been active both in the GOP and in the splinter U.S. Taxpayers Party; but their greater influence, as they themselves would doubtless agree, has been felt in the sphere of ideas, in helping change the terms of discourse on the traditionalist right. One of their services right off the bat has been to allow everyone else to feel moderate. To wit: almost any anti-abortion stance seems nuanced compared with Gary North's advocacy of public execution not just for women who undergo abortions but for those who advised them to do so. And with the Rushdoony faction proposing the actual judicial murder of gays, fewer blink at the position of a Gary Bauer or a Janet Folger, who support laws exposing them to mere imprisonment.

Among other ideas Reconstructionists have helped popularize is that state neutrality on the subject of religion is meaningless. Any legal order is bound to "establish" one religious order or another, the argument runs, and the only question is whose. Put the question that way, and watch your polemical troubles disappear: if we're getting a theocracy anyway, why not mine?

"The Christian goal for the world," Recon theologian David Chilton has explained, is "the universal development of Biblical theocratic republics". Scripturally based law would be enforced by the state with a stern rod in these republics. And not just any scriptural law, either, but a hardline-originalist version of Old Testament law -- the point at which even most fundamentalists agree things start to get "scary". American evangelicals have tended to hold that the bloodthirsty pre-Talmudic Mosaic code, with its quick resort to capital punishment, its flogging and stoning and countenancing of slavery, was mostly if not entirely superseded by the milder precepts of the New Testament (the "dispensationalist" view, as it's called). Not so, say the Reconstructionists. They reckon only a relative few dietary and ritualistic observances were overthrown.

So when Exodus 21:15-17 prescribes that cursing or striking a parent is to be punished by execution, that's fine with Gary North. "When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime," he writes. "The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death." Likewise with blasphemy, dealt with summarily in Leviticus 24:16: "And he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him."

Reconstructionists provide the most enthusiastic constituency for stoning since the Taliban seized Kabul. "Why stoning?" asks North. "There are many reasons. First, the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." Thrift and ubiquity aside, "[e]xecutions are community projects�not with spectators who watch a professional executioner do 'his' duty, but rather with actual participants". You might even say that like square dances or quilting bees, they represent the kind of hands-on neighborliness so often missed in this impersonal era. "That modern Christians never consider the possibility of the reintroduction of stoning for capital crimes," North continues, "indicates how thoroughly humanistic concepts of punishment have influenced the thinking of Christians." And he may be right about that last point, you know.

The Recons are keenly aware of the p.r. difficulties such views pose as they become more widely known. Brian Abshire writes in the January Chalcedon Report, the official magazine of Rushdoony's institute, that the "judicial sanctions" are "at the root" of the antipathy most evangelicals still show towards Reconstruction. Indeed, as the press spotlight has intensified, prominent religious conservatives have edged away. For a while, the Coalition on Revival (COR), an umbrella group set up to "bring America back to its biblical foundations" by identifying common ground among Christian right activists of differing theological backgrounds, allowed leading Reconstructionists to chum around with such figures as televangelist D. James Kennedy (whose Coral Ridge Ministries also employed militant Reconstructionist George Grant as a vice president) and National Association of Evangelicals lobbyist Robert Dugan.

In recent years, however, the COR has lost many of its best-known members; former Virginia lieutenant governor candidate Mike Farris, for example, told The Washington Post that he left the group because "it started heading to a theocracy...and I don't believe in a theocracy". John Whitehead, a Rushdoony protégé who, with Chalcedon assistance, launched the Rutherford Institute to pursue religious litigation, has moved with some vigor to disavow his old mentor's views.

Prominent California philanthopist Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given Rushdoony's operations more than $700,000 over the years, may also be loosening his ties. According to the June 30, 1996 Orange County Register, Ahmanson has departed the Chalcedon board and says he "does not embrace all of Rushdoony's teachings". An heir of the Home Savings bank fortune, Ahmanson has also been an important donor to numerous other groups including the Claremont Institute, the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and�just to show how complicated life gets�the Reason Foundation, the publisher of this magazine (for projects not associated with its publication).

The continuing, extensive Reconstructionist presence in fields like the home schooling movement poses for libertarians an obvious question: How serious do differences have to become before it becomes inappropriate to overlook them in an otherwise good cause? The printed program of last year's Separation of School & State Alliance convention constituted an odd ideological mix in which certified good guys such as Sheldon Richman, Jim Bovard and Don Boudreaux alternated with Chalcedon stalwarts like Samuel Blumenfeld, Howard Phillips, and Rushdoony himself.

Lest such relations become unduly frictionless, here's a clip-and-save sampler of Reconstructionist quotes to keep on hand:

• On the link between reason and liberty: "Reason itself is not an objective 'given' but is itself a divinely created instrument employed by the unregenerate to further their attack on God." The "appeal to reason as final arbiter" must be rejected; "if man is permitted autonomy in one sphere he will soon claim autonomy in all spheres. We therefore deny every expression of human autonomy�liberal, conservative or libertarian." Thus affirmed Andrew Sandlin, in the January Chalcedon Report.
• Intellectual liberty (other religions dept.): Hindus, Muslims and the like would still be free to practice their rites "in the privacy of your own home. But you would not be allowed to proselytize and undermine the order of the state. Every civil order protects its foundations," wrote the late Recon theologian Greg Bahnsen. Bahnsen adds that the interdiction applies to "someone [who] comes and proselytizes for another god or another final authority (and by the way, that god may be man)."
• Intellectual liberty (where secularists fit in dept.): "All sides of the humanistic spectrum are now, in principle, demonic; communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans," explains Rushdoony. "When someone tries to undermine the commitment to Jehovah which is fundamental to the civil order of a godly state�then that person needs to be restrained by the magistrate. Those who will not acknowledge Jehovah as the ultimate authority behind the civil law code which the magistrate is enforcing would be punished and repressed," wrote Bahnsen.
• On ultimate goals: "So let us be blunt about it." says Gary North. "We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God."

First appeared December 18, 1997, in Slate.

"THIS IS TOUGH NEWS. It's not pleasant to hear," said former Education Secretary William Bennett on ABC's This Week Nov. 9. "But it's very important, and it's part of telling the truth." The occasion for tough-but-needed truth telling: Bill Clinton's first-ever presidential speech to an organized gay-rights group, the Human Rights Campaign. Clinton had conferred respectability -- wrongly -- on the gay quest for approval when in fact, said Bennett, he "should tell the truth on this one": Homosexuality "takes 30 years off your life." The average life expectancy for gay men, Bennett declared, was just 43.

Many a mother's heart around the country must have sunk at that moment amid premonitions that she would outlive her son. A well-known public figure would think twice before delivering tidings that grim, right? And Bennett's statistic was no slip. Only days later, in the Nov. 24 Weekly Standard, he repeated the assertion phrased for maximum emphasis:

"The best available research suggests that the average life span of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age. Forty-three." (Italics his.)

Yes, it's a sensational, arresting number, which may soon pass into general circulation. Already, for example, the National Review has repeated it unskeptically in an editorial. Where did the figure come from, and how plausible is it?

Bennett got the number from Paul Cameron, a researcher well known to followers of gay controversies. Cameron, a former assistant professor at the University of Nebraska who has consulted for such gay-rights opponents as former Rep. William Dannemeyer, R-Calif., heads a group called the Family Research Institute. Cameron resigned under fire from the American Psychological Association and was later formally terminated from membership following complaints about his research methods. He has had run-ins with other professional groups, including the Nebraska Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association. According to Mark Pietrzyk's exposé in the Oct. 3, 1994, New Republic, the state of Colorado initially hired Cameron as an expert witness to defend its statute restricting gay-rights ordinances, then elected not to use his testimony after it got a closer look. His life-span figures have circulated for years in religious-right circles, but Bennett's comments appear to represent their first real breakout into wider public discussion.

Cameron's method had the virtue of simplicity, at least. He and two co-authors read through back numbers of various urban gay community papers, mostly of the giveaway sort that are laden with bar ads and personals. They counted up obituaries and news stories about deaths, noted the ages of the deceased, computed the average, and published the resulting numbers as estimates of gay life expectancy.

What do vital-statistics buffs think of this technique? Nick Eberstadt at the American Enterprise Institute sums up the reactions of several of his fellow demographers: "The method as you describe it is just ridiculous." But you don't have to be a trained statistician to spot the fallacy at its heart, which is, to quote Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistician John Karon, that "you're only getting the ages of those who die." Gay men of the same generation destined to live to old age, even if more numerous, won't turn up in the sample.

Other critics rattle off further objections. The deaths reported in these papers, mostly AIDS deaths, will tend to represent the community defined by such papers or directly known to their editors. It will include relatively more subjects who live in town and are overtly gay and relatively few who blend into the suburbs and seldom set foot in bars. It will overrepresent those whose passing strikes others as newsworthy and underrepresent those who end their days in retired obscurity in some sunny clime.

Bennett is a busy man, but even he has access to the back of an envelope. A moment's thought might have suggested a few simple test calculations. Suppose he assumes�wildly pessimistically, given current incidence data�that half the gay male population is destined to catch the AIDS virus and die of it. The actual average age of AIDS patients at death has been about 40. (Presumably protease inhibitors will extend average longevity, but that will only increase Bennett's difficulty.) For the number 43 to be the true average death age for the entire population of gay males, HIV-negative gay men would, on average, have to keel into their graves at 46. Looked at another way, if even half the gay male population stays HIV-negative and lives to an average age of 75, an average overall life span of 43 implies that gay males with AIDS die at an implausibly early average age (11, actually).

Against this, Cameron and his supporters argue that, according to their survey of obits, even if they don't have AIDS, homosexual males tend to die by their mid-40s (and lesbians by their late 40s). Some downright peculiar results followed from this inference. One is that -- contrary to the opinion of virtually everyone else in the world -- AIDS in fact hasn't reduced gay males' life expectancy by that much -- a few years, at most. Moreover, the obits also recorded lots of violent and accidental deaths. From this Cameron and company concluded not that newsworthy deaths tend to get into newspapers, but that gays must experience shockingly high rates of violent death. With a perfectly straight face they report, for example, that lesbians are at least 300 times more likely to die in car crashes than females of similar ages in general.

Unfortunately there really is no satisfactory measure of actual life expectancy among gay men. However, Harry Rosenberg, the mortality-statistics chief at the National Center for Health Statistics, says he's unaware of evidence that HIV-negative gays have a lower life expectancy than other males. Rosenberg also points to one reason to think the HIV-negative gay male may actually live longer on average than the straight male: Gays may have higher incomes and more education on average than straights -- two factors powerfully correlated with longer life spans. (Bennett himself appears to share this view, terming gays, "as a group, wealthy and well educated.")

Challenged by the Human Rights Campaign's Elizabeth Birch in the letters column of the Dec. 8 Standard, Bennett, remarkably, dug in to defend the Cameron numbers, which he said coincided with the views of other authorities such as psychiatrist Jeffrey Satinover. Satinover's 1996 book, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth, does discuss gay life spans, but cites as its authority� Cameron's study. In other words, Bennett is not adducing a second authority for his assertions but merely falling back on the first via its recycling by another writer.

Throughout the controversy, Bennett has made much of the cause of "truth" with a capital T. His Standard article, portentously titled "Clinton, Gays, and the Truth," accused the Clintonites of scanting that important commodity. Bennett is right to the extent that there's no excuse for telling falsehoods in the course of raising otherwise legitimate issues. He should mind his own lesson.

First appeared in Reason, January 1996.

THE OLD NEWS about Andrew Sullivan is his supposed bundle-of-contrasts persona: young British conservative who edits the venerable American liberal New Republic; Catholic but gay; fan of stuffy Michael Oakeshott but P.I.B. (Person In Black) of Gap-ad fame. The new news is that in Virtually Normal he emerges much more clearly as a partisan of classical-liberal, if not quite libertarian, views.

Perhaps the most remarkable element of this book is the way Sullivan sets himself squarely against the main demand of what passes for liberal, moderate, and even conservative gay politics these days: laws banning private bias against homosexuals in jobs, housing, and the like. In doing so, he helps revive a powerful yet half-forgotten rationale for classical liberalism: Even if you don't see the issue of politics as one of respecting individual rights, even if you set aside any love of liberty as such or the prosperity it engenders, it's still worth limiting the power of government because that's the only true route to social unity and peace, the only real alternative to "terminal wrangling" and the war of all against all.

The proper wonk approach to this kind of book is to skip past the sex stuff to get to the policy discussion, but a few words about the former are to the point. Appearances notwithstanding, discussion of this issue is not entirely resistant to factual findings. Sober gay advocates have receded from earlier wild guesses of 10 percent prevalence to a more plausible estimate of perhaps 2 or 3 percent of the male population.

For their part, religious traditionalists and kindred opponents have gradually become aware of current scientific views as summarized by Judge Richard Posner in Sex and Reason: "Homosexual preference, especially male homosexual preference, appears to be widespread; perhaps to be innate; to exist in most, perhaps all, societies, whether they are tolerant of homosexuality or repressive of it; to be almost completely�perhaps completely�resistant to treatment; and to be no more common in tolerant than in repressive societies." As a result, many of these traditionalists have refocused their efforts away from trying to convert gays to straighthood�the very high rate of smashup in marriages contracted under these circumstances may have influenced them�and now try to talk them into lifelong celibacy instead.

Sullivan expends a fair bit of effort respectfully taking issue both with religious doctrine, especially that of the Catholic Church, and with the kind of Foucault-style social constructionism that views homosexuality as "transgressive" and means that as high praise. Readers who never felt tempted by either set of doctrines should remain patient, because brevity is a Sullivan virtue, and he is soon off to other matters.

He chides many mainstreamers who are happy to tolerate all sorts of self-destructive shenanigans out of public view but worry that any public Gertrude-and-Alice visibility, however sedate and domestic, will tempt the "waverers" said to be perched on the sexuality fence. Gays, meanwhile, says Sullivan, would do well to learn the bourgeois virtues, lest they be caught up in the "hedonism, loneliness and deceit" that critics only too accurately perceive in much of their subculture. Much of Sullivan's thunder on these issues has been stolen by his own earlier writings, and by those of Bruce Bawer, Jonathan Rauch, and others over the past few years (much in his own New Republic). But this will stand as a major account by any reckoning.

Now back to policy. Even in our tolerant society and even aside from AIDS, gays face a long list of problems, but it's almost insane to imagine that systematic denial of jobs or housing could rank among the top 10. Yet in an extraordinary triumph of ideology over constituent interest, organized gaydom has concentrated on passing anti-bias laws even though this has meant neglecting the cause of repealing laws against homosexual relations themselves, which remain on the books in many states.

Much of this emphasis can surely be attributed to the spirit of the times. For years "discrimination" has served in liberal reform circles pretty much the same conceptual function as "sin" in a Bible Belt seminary: It's been the central organizing principle of disapproval, and in practice the idea to pick up and run with when some new push to correct human nature is contemplated.

Also at fault are the bogus analogies that couple the cars on the Freedom Train. Because housing bias has been a problem for, say, blacks and Jews, it follows that gays should also beware real estate agents. (More likely, they are the real estate agents.) Then there's the legacy of the left, which presumes that the oppression nexus for any newly discovered minority group will be employment.

The anti-bias model has led gay advocates into increasingly untenable positions, such as the claim in the pending Supreme Court case that the U.S. Constitution prohibits the voters of Colorado from ruling out anti-bias laws based on homosexual orientation (though they're not obliged to pass them in the first place). And all for what? In the years such laws have been on the books, as Sullivan points out, very little seems to have changed in the relative local climate for gays in the covered places. Wisconsin's first-in-the-nation law is "almost never used"; sexual preference cases make up only 1 percent of its bias caseload. In The Corporate Closet: The Professional Lives of Gay Men in America (1993), James D. Woods and Jay H. Lucas found that few of their interview subjects expected to enlist the aid of such laws if their relations with their bosses took a dive. Very sensibly, they were "reluctant to seek legal solutions to what they perceive are interpersonal problems"�especially, one presumes, where going to court would invite public scrutiny of their private lives.

So the great rationale for these laws instead turns out to be reassurance that society really, genuinely does care about its target group. Using a similar sort of logic, a 33-year-old paraplegic told the Chicago Tribune when Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, "Now able-bodied people won't look down on us as individuals." But unlike the engraved testimonial that the Wizard of Oz gave the Tin Man to buck up his self-esteem, the bias-law variety of assurance that you're an OK Person Too comes with real costs to others.

As Sullivan stresses, it adds to "the now elaborate rules governing how individuals can associate with and employ people," rules which cumulatively "inhibit freedom of choice," notably "one person's liberty to hire the kind of people he or she want[s]." Controls on the "fundamental" liberty of contract, coupled with hate-speech rules which curtail each person's "right to say what he or she fe[els] about others," add up to "clear and real limitations on what were once regarded as inviolable liberties."

Sullivan cites few cases, but they're not hard to find in news reports and litigation records. A municipal ordinance in Madison, Wisconsin, got two young women in trouble for preferring straight to lesbian roommates. Minnesota officials successfully pressed charges against a health club run by born-again Christians who were hiring only their co-believers as managers; although Minneapolis musclemen and their trainers surely had plenty of other options, the cause of "diversity" required the suppression of this odd little institution, even as the famed Vietnamese hamlet had to be destroyed in order to be saved.

Other employment lawsuits have been at least as troubling. The biggest court award came in Collins v. Shell Oil, a case so embarrassing that gay activists seldom cite it. It involved a man who was fired after he left on an office printer the sort of blush-to-relate material about his private life that could easily have gotten a straight man fired mutatis mutandis under current sexual harassment rules curbing the circulation of lewd matter in the workplace. Instead a court handed him $5.3 million.

Then there was John Dill's complaint that former employer Bryan Griggs had harassed him at the office by 1) playing conservative talk radio shows; and 2) posting a letter from a local Congresswoman skeptical of gay service in the military. (Dill hadn't objected to either the radio or the letter posting at the time.) A spokeswoman for the Seattle human rights commission said the claims might well fly under the city law. After Griggs�who said he didn't know Dill was gay at all�had spent $5,000 on legal defense, Dill dropped the charges, explaining that his point had been made.

The Seattle Times called Dill's complaint a "scary assault on the First Amendment," which did not prevent Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) from telling The Advocate that "you see a record of zero horror stories" under these laws. This may be the sort of thing Florence King had in mind when she wrote: "I don't mind being regarded as perverted and unnatural, but I would die if people thought I was a Democrat."

It's not that Sullivan opposes ambitious gay rights measures. In particular, he's become famous for arguing the case for same-sex marriage and acceptance in military service (and does so again in Virtually Normal). Both, he believes, would help assimilate homosexuals into the matrix of society. Moreover, both would move the government itself toward a position of neutrality between gay and straight citizens, and neutrality is a suitable demand for classical liberals to place on their government.

But most bias fights are over the application of laws to private actors, not the government. And even a cursory look at recent controversies�over the Boston Irish parade and the Boy Scouts, for instance � suggests that, as Sullivan observes, anti-bias measures have "seemed to intensify the hostility shown toward homosexuals rather than mollify it." And no wonder: Their aim is to "educate a backward majority in the errors of its ways" at the cost of some of its liberty. Observing the complex range of not always rational emotions in gay-straight relations, they seek to "reduce all these emotions to a binary bigoted-tolerant axis, and legislate in favor of the tolerant."

Yet, Sullivan argues, using the government to enforce some citizens' views of virtue and the good life over others' is what liberalism was "invented specifically to oppose." Having reversed its policy, its modern successor "has now come to seem a fomenter of social division," "deeply implicated" in growing societal warfare. "It has come, in other words, to resemble the problem it was originally designed to fix."

Hence what Sullivan aptly calls his "peace proposal." He suggests "disentangling from each other legally, by avoiding any actual interaction in which citizens seek legal redress from other citizens about homosexuality." There'd be "[n]o cures or re-educations, no wrenching private litigation, no political imposition of tolerance." Instead there'd be liberty, amid purely formal legal equality.

Sullivan does not always seem to realize that when it comes to the government's own operations�whom to employ, how to tax, what methods to recognize for the legitimation of children�fixing on a goal of formal neutrality is only the first, not the last, step in analysis. Anti-bias norms enforced by litigation carry major costs even when applied to public employment; most citizens will feel that efficacy rather than neutrality should rule in the military if the two happen to clash. Indeed, announcing a goal of neutrality merely purchases a ticket to a maze of practical considerations that in a fair-minded system will not always be resolved in the direction of gay equivalency, in family law or anything else.

Though short on research and on consideration of practical details, an essay like Sullivan's can hardly be every sort of book at once. Enough that it raises at long last the right sorts of questions about its subject. Its author can bask in the compliment paid him by London's Independent: "Sullivan is a political thinker and yet every sentence is imbued with a sense of the limitations of politics."

First appeared in National Review, January 24, 1994.

If, like Tony Kushner, you plan to write a second play wringing another three and a half hours of drama out of the same small set of characters, it is perhaps tempting fate to let one of your players in Part I toss off a quip about "the limitations of the imagination. It's something you learn after your first theme party it's all been done before."

But Angels in America, reviewers seem to agree, is no ordinary stage work subject to ordinary rules. It is an event: a theatrical event, of course, playing to full houses, with a sackful of Tony and Drama Desk prizes, as well as a Pulitzer; but also a literary, artistic, and moral event: a "masterpiece" (The New Yorker), "the broadest, deepest, most searching American play of our time" (Newsweek). Here, one might hope, is a long-awaited revival of the theater of ideas. As a "Gay Fantasia on National Themes" that crossed over to charm many straight suburbanites, it might also be expected to contribute to mutual understanding on that vexed current issue.

Now, after much anticipation, the second half of Angels has been installed alongside the first at the Walter Kerr Theater in New York. The two productions share the same fine director (George C. Wolfe) and often-virtuosic cast, permitting a sort of double-blind comparison between the sugar-coated "Millennium Approaches" (Part I) and the more medicinal "Perestroika" (Part II).

The virtues of Part I, it turns out, are those of traditional entertainment: a steady flow of funny lines and clever observations, defying the gravity of its subject, AIDS, like a masonry bridge, by a sustained use of the arch. The pacing is sharp enough to keep you from caring that the poetic flights and recycled religious imagery don't really make much sense, or that little is happening by way of plot. ("Nobody even died yet," grumbled one patron on his way out.) Even less happens in Part II. In the central dramatic situation of Part I, Louis Ironson (Joe Mantello), overcome by nursing his AIDS-stricken lover, has abandoned him. Now, not very surprisingly, he is failing either to find a new love or be taken back by the old. The traditional playwright's answer would be to send him off to perform some great moral gesture, probably by stopping a bullet, but instead he's left to welter in guilt.

Being Mr. Kushner's alter ego, he at least gets an allotment of choice lines. The cast-off Prior Walter (Stephen Spinella), endearingly ditsy in Part I (as when, in diva drag, he pronounced himself an impending "corpsette"), is now well on his way to crankhood, groaning under tablets of prophecy and robed with heavy ideas. Worse dramatic fates await Louis's admirer, the gay Republican lawyer Joe Pitt (David Marshall Grant), and Joe's wife, Harper (Marcia Gay Harden), whose mental derangement is (excuse the solecism) insufficiently motivated, unless you believe that being married to a Republican will do the trick. About the only improvement in characterization is the closer look we get at Hannah Pitt (Kathleen Chalfant), Joe's mother, a stern woman with a talent for knocking the self-indulgence out of characters like Harper.

On the other hand, the character of Roy Cohn, which gave Ron Leibman a justly celebrated star turn in Part 1, now lies abed with little to do while other characters rant on about how awful he is (the "pole star of human evil the worst person who ever lived," etc.). In Part 1, when the ghost of convicted spy Ethel Rosenberg (the fine Kathleen Chalfant again) arrived to haunt him for his role in her execution, she was coolly detached, operating mostly through pauses (as Shakespeare knew, ghosts thrive on silence). Now, to vastly less effect, she tells the dying Cohn that she hates him and laughs at his pain. I have no use for Cohn either, but this is high-school revenge-fantasy stuff.

The funny lines are fewer this time, as are the wry currents of self-deprecation that are needed amid material like this if anger, portentousness, and self-pity are not to intrude like salt into a water table. A chief casualty is Belize, the wisecracking black nurse (Jeffrey Wright), now dismally swollen into a Conscience, the only character the others aren't allowed to score points off, even when he announces, "I hate America." The Angel (Ellen McLaughlin), who descended at the close of Part 1, is also now much in evidence, a beautiful bore. She turns a somersault in the air, a pretty exercise, so she repeats it at intervals through the evening, suggesting first a celestial gymnast and finally Cal Worthington, the Los Angeles car dealer who used to stand on his head on TV ads. In another classic instance of more-is-less, Prior, who was jolted by a sudden vision of a neon aleph in Part I, is now shown the better part of the Hebrew alphabet.

Far more moving is the final scene, where Mr. Kushner gathers his favorite characters in front of the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park. The sacred waters of the original Bethesda were believed to work miraculous cures, and Prior invites us to imagine a future day when humanity will have passed through the healing flood to emerge whole on the other side. Atop the fountain we see the statue of an angel. "They commemorate death, but they symbolize a world without dying. ...They are made of stone, the heaviest thing on earth, but they symbolize the power of flight."

At moments like this, Mr. Kushner strives for universality and reconciliation. In a nice exchange, Prior, on learning that Mother Pitt is fairly serious about her Mormonism, declares her views "repellent" to him. "How do you know what's going on in my head?" she shoots back. "You don't make assumptions about me, I won't make them about you." She soon shows herself rather more sophisticated than he is.

"I wish you would be more true to your demographic profile," he says, wittily chastened.

Sad to say, that passage is atypical: the crowd-pleasing swipes at conservatives, Republicans, and Mormons, an occasional irritant in Part I, have multiplied this time to fill the dramatic vacuum. They even undermine the play structurally. At the start, Mr. Kushner committed himself to making one of his principal characters, Joe Pitt, both a gay man and an idealistic Reaganite who ghostwrites opinions for a conservative appellate judge. The resulting portrait was uneasy in Part 1, but by now Mr. Kushner is simply fed up with this character and assigns him unbelievable lines and motivations.

In a climactic spat, Louis, who has secretly dug up and read a stack of the opinions his boyfriend has written for the judge, confronts him with his complicity in (we are meant to believe) the ultimate, apocalyptic evil.

It's too bad. A playwright widely lauded for his imagination, one that ranges from Antarctic ice floes to manhole covers in heaven, can't imagine what it's like to be a conservative. And the resulting harangues will seem as unpleasant and off-putting to intelligent conservative playgoers as well, as many of the contents of conservative magazines these days will seem to intelligent gay readers.

We need not demand new ideas in a stage work, and we don't get them in Angels in America. But we might hope for a bit more of the advertised insight into the common humanity of both sides, rather than yet another shove toward the polarization and politicization of this subject.

Meanwhile, those false friends, the overpraising reviewers, do their best to turn Tony Kushner into a monument. For the moment, all it looks as if they've succeeded in doing is taking away his power to fly.