Those who write columns on politics invariably provoke strong responses, much of it in my case negative, often vehemently so.
But there have also been some recurring themes in the criticism over the years which illustrate how hyper-partisanship can sometimes lead us to stop reading after the first paragraph and make unwarranted assumptions about the rest.
One of the more common of these misperceptions from my experience is to be labeled an "arch" or "hard-core" conservative. This is odd because no one who has read my columns should have missed that libertarian strain the size of the Mississippi running through them.
Although it is true that conservatives and libertarians often make common cause these days in their resistance to the nanny state's encroachments, there remains a great deal of ideological space between the two, particularly when you move from economics to cultural and social turf. To call an avowed libertarian an "arch-conservative" is thus akin to calling a moderate Democrat a "Stalinist."
Closely related to this ideological mistake is the tendency of lefty critics to assume that anyone taking positions that could be considered "on the right" (or at least not on the left) must draw inspiration from religious sources, that it isn't just "conservatism" but "religious conservatism" more specifically that offends.
Again, it would be interesting to see if anyone could comb through the columns I have written over time and find any wherein I've associated myself firmly with social conservatism or spouted scripture to bolster a line of argument (to the contrary, it would probably be easy to find plenty of barbs flung at folks who do).
This does not mean any lack of support on my part for the concept of religious liberty, as a crucial dimension of liberty more broadly conceived, or any disrespect for organized religion per se, most especially the contribution that Christianity has made to the development of Western civilization.
Along such lines, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama has gone as far as to argue that the principle of equality before the law that undergirds liberal democracy is itself merely a secular transmutation of the earlier Christian belief in equality before God. And there are even times when I find myself in a church pew on Sunday mornings half-listening to the sermon.
But I've never been tempted to base anything I've written on Christian doctrine, let alone join up with the righteous legions of the religious right. To the contrary, and as an "arch" libertarian, I have written on behalf of gay marriage (a good decade or more ago, when it was hardly fashionable to do so), legal abortion (with reasonable restrictions), and the legalization of almost all currently illegal drugs (going beyond marijuana and cocaine). I have come out against capital punishment and in favor of legalizing prostitution and all forms of gambling and frequently railed against dry counties because of the paternalistic logic behind them.
Taken together, those are hardly positions that Christian conservatives would find congenial. I suspect they are also a great deal more "liberal" (permissive?) than those taken by most of my left-leaning critics.
A third trope is that the ideas in my columns somehow reflect "talking points" picked up from Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or other despised conservative media sources.
So for the record: I've never seen Fox News, except every other year on the evening of the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, when I'm panning through channels for election returns. And the reason I don't watch Fox isn't because I hold any animus against it, but because I don't watch television news of any kind. And haven't for decades. Going further, I don't really watch much television; except for certain sports events and a couple of favored cable shows (like Mad Men, which we DVR so we can skip through the commercials).
Indeed, weeks might go by at certain times of the year (like now, before football starts up) when I never turn on the thing. Why? Because I think it makes people stupid. And because every minute spent watching the boob tube is a minute taken away from reading a good book.
I must also confess to never having heard a single episode of Rush Limbaugh's radio program, although, apparently, many years ago, he spent part of one discussing one of my columns (but I can't even be sure of that since I never heard it, and was only told about it by others who had). As with Fox News and the television that seldom gets turned on, this has less to do with Limbaugh than with the fact I have never listened to talk radio.
So please: Get it right, at least at the start. There are undoubtedly plenty of wingnut libertarians out there, myself perhaps among them.
But as shocking as it might be to leftists hermetically sealed within their little ideological bubbles, it really is possible to believe in individual freedom through limited government and the rule of law without being a "religious conservative" (or any kind of "conservative," for that matter), without throwing Bibles at alleged blasphemers, and without spending the day on the couch glued to "Faux News."
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 07/07/2014