CULTURE

• I’m against quotas and discrimination lawsuits based on race, gender, or sexual orientation. Affirmative Action is Positively Poisonous. Diversity is divisive.

• The government should stay out of everyone’s bedrooms—unless you’re into that sort of kink—but would everyone puh-leeeze reciprocate and quit dragging their brass-frame beds out into the Town Square? You’re stinking up the place. Quit letting it all hang out and start tucking it all back in.

• If you want to be an artist, paint your scrawny little fingers off, honey. Just don’t expect me to subsidize it with taxes. Remember that Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life, which means you’d be even better than he was if you never sell anything.

• I don’t feel especially patriotic or pro-American, but I think my tune would change if I had to go live in Swaziland for a year and then returned here.

So where do those stances place me in the political rainbow? I still have no idea, so I decided to administer myself a bunch of those “political-spectrum quizzes” you see online all the time. Someone told me they’re scientific and everything.

Some of the multiple-choice items were easy to answer. I checked “Strongly Agree” on both “It bugs me when somebody names their child something like ‘Sunshine’ or ‘Charm’” and “It should be legal for two consenting adults to challenge each other to a duel and fight a Death Match.”

Other questions were phrased so ineptly, it was impossible to give a correct answer. I was asked whether I agreed with this statement: “Inequality is natural and must be preserved and controlled.” If it’s natural, you wouldn’t need to control it, now, would you? And: “It is wrong to enforce moral behavior through the law because this infringes upon an individual’s freedom.” Well, I guess that hinges on whether we’re defining “moral behavior” as stopping someone from machine-gunning a bus full of incontinent nuns or preventing them from diddling their own naughty bits in the privacy of a warm bubble bath at home.

In all, I took eighteen such tests. One wound up classifying me as an anarchist, which is impossible because I use deodorant. Another deemed me a “Liberal Nationalist,” and I’m afraid to look up what that even means. The overarching trend was that I am either a conservative or a libertarian. If forced to pick, I’ll take the latter, seeing as “conservative” starts with the same four letters as “constipated.”

One test classified me as fitting the ideological profile of the “Catholic Supremacy Party.” Another said I was 100% liberal and 0% conservative. Most troubling was an unexpected trend that when it comes to cultural and social issues, I veer more toward liberalism than conservatism, a result which I found degrading, humiliating, and had me curled up in a ball at the bottom of the shower hoping I could wash the stain away.

Scratch what I said about these tests being scientific.