By Scott Tibbs, September 11, 2008
On August 28, I received an email from a reader criticizing me for linking to Gun Owners of America, because of alleged connections by the GOA's president to white supremacist groups. I was not aware of these alleged connections prior to reading that email two weeks ago. Over the weekend, I decided to remove the link - not because I have a problem with GOA, but to give the local Left one fewer thing to complain about. When my most recent letter to the editor was published yesterday, a commenter brought up the link to GOA in the comments section and attacked me for linking to the Second Amendment rights organization.
The reason I linked to GOA is because I support GOA's mission to defend our Second Amendment rights against attempts by government to restrict those rights, and to roll back restrictions on our Second Amendment rights already in place. I'm sure there are people involved with GOA whom I disagree with on matters other than gun control. Since I am going to be criticized for generally supporting GOA's mission anyway, I put the link to GOA back on the links page, and added the following disclaimer: "The above links do not imply support of everything at the linked sites, or support of everyone involved in those sites."
This should be fairly obvious already. If I only included sites I completely agree with on my links page, I link to I would not link to Masson's Blog or Taking Down Words. I link to Rush Limbaugh too, and I have criticized him on more than one occasion. (See posts from April 5 and April 29.) I frequently disagree with the New York Times editorial page and I am often harshly critical of the Bloomington Herald-Times.
Sometimes a link is just a link.
