When I came to JoeUser, I originally wanted to blog on religion. My religious articles; however, sunk like a lead balloon, and my political articles attracted the attention. As a result, the religious articles were abandoned; after all, you write what gets read.

It took me some time, but I figured out why the difference. You see, in religious topics, while I hold very conservative personal religious views, I do so with some degree of uncertainty. I'm not willing to be definitive in my approach to others in an area with so much ambiguity. While no biblical scholar, I've read enough of the text in English and compared it with the Greek, Hebrew, and Chaldean translations to understand that sometimes what you read in English is not the same as what the original author intended. Like it or not, "translator bias" is hard to overcome. As a result, many of my articles on religion tend to be centrist in nature.

My feelings on politics are different. While "translator bias" affects even our own Constitution, as a historian, I am relatively certain of the intent of many of the framers of the Constitution. And I am relatively certain as to most of my other political views as well. While compromise is certainly an important element in crafting legislation, it is vitally important to know where you stand. And I definitely know that much.

A recent response to one of my articles suggested I take a less combative approach to my articles. See, I have to disagree here. If anything, I need to be MORE combative. These are important issues, and they won't go away with the lighting of incense and the chanting of a couple mantras.

While fence sitting articles may be insightful and intelligent, they don't bring readers, and they DEFINITELY don't bring responses. You don't find a lot of centrist columnists for that reason. You need to evoke a powerful positive or negative visceral reaction from your reader in order to stand out from the literally millions of other blog sites flooding the internet, and you just don't do that with a centrist article. And, in fact, a negative reaction can have a better net benefit than a positive one; when I write articles that generate negative reactions, they tend to get syndicated to other sites and linked by opponents who want to point out to their readers "this imbecile on the internet". I don't mind. In fact, I rather enjoy it.

I am quickly coming to the belief that this is why Libertarian writers are in high demand, but don't win a lot of high profile elections. We have strong views that tend to bring readership, but when push comes to shove, most Americans want a relatively centrist government. Democrats and Republicans do a better job of "selling themselves" than do Libertarians, and even if their tag is somewhat misleading, what matters is the voters you can produce on election day.