First appeared in the Chicago Free Press on March 5, 2008.
For the most part—allowing for occasional lapses of taste—I don't write about politics, at least not about the horse-race aspects of which candidates are ahead, which will come out on top, which of their strategies did and didn't work, etc. I follow those matters with some interest but with a sense of detachment. I am not part of that process.
For one thing, there are plenty of other writers in the mainstream and gay press, and innumerable bloggers, television commentators and talk radio personalities who eagerly share their opinions and speculations. I doubt if I have anything new and significant to add, anything that some or all of them haven't already said.
So far as indicating a preference for one candidate over another, whether openly or between the lines, there hardly seems much point. To do that would be an exercise in egotism. I write for a limited-circulation newspaper. Nothing I write is going to affect the outcome of an election. Then too, I understand my job to be writing about gay issues, broadly conceived, and I figure that most people already know who the gay-supportive candidates are.
Nor do I have much enthusiasm for any of the candidates who are or have been running. They all have a few good points on gay or other issues and a large number of bad points: I generally tend to agree more with the criticism candidates make of one another than I do with the candidates themselves. The most that could be said of any of them is that they seem less bad than the others.
It is no secret that I am, on the whole, a libertarian, meaning that I view governments (city, state, federal) with deep suspicion. Government is a Borg, constantly grasping more power, more control, more of our money.
I am in favor of both economic and civil liberties. Economic liberties include lower taxes (for everyone), less government spending, and less government interference in the marketplace and our economic lives. Civil liberties include more freedom from government intrusion into our personal lives, free speech, personal privacy and property rights, abortion and drugs decriminalization. And this necessarily entails equal treatment of gays and heterosexuals.
None of the viable candidates believes anything like this. Which is not surprising because they are part of the government and have a vested interest in promising government policies using government power and government money (ultimately your tax money) for various constituencies.
So, I want there to be a line on the ballot that says "None of the Above." If that line got a majority, the parties would have to go back, find new policy packages and/or new candidates and try again in a second election in, say, three months. At the very least, "None of the Above" would be a safety valve for those of us who feel dissatisfied with the "choices" we are offered.
To be sure, there is the small Libertarian Party which espouses libertarian principles. And I have voted for its candidates pretty regularly in national elections since they first ran a candidate in 1972. The candidate that year was University of Southern California philosophy professor John Hospers who had just written a book called "Libertarianism." As I recall, he got about 6,000 votes nationwide.
I remember casting a write-in vote for Hospers that was almost not counted. A major-party election judge was about to throw out my ballot as a joke vote like Mickey Mouse when a friend of mine stepped in to explain that Hospers was a real candidate of a real party. Hospers also got one vote in the electoral college from a renegade Republican elector in Virginia.
People sometimes say, "But you're throwing away your vote. Don't you want your vote to count?" But I defy anyone to show me that their precious little vote made any difference in any election they have ever voted in. If it didn't, then their vote didn't "count" any more than mine did. They might as well have gone to Starbucks and had an espresso instead of voting.
In fact, we might say my vote "counted" more than theirs because my vote was a larger portion of the vote for the candidate I voted for than theirs was of the candidate they favored.
There you have it. I don't like the major-party candidates, so I vote Libertarian. Is that a protest vote? In a sense, yes. But, of course, I am also voting for what I believe. If I voted for "None of the Above" it wouldn't be clear what I was for. But "None of the Above" should be on the ballot for people to vote for if they aren't libertarian.