I should have known after all these years that stardom for a character actor like me would amount to one role. Sir Alec Guinness, after years of breathtaking performances on stage in Shakespeare (Richard III at Stratford) and on screen (Tunes of Glory and The Bridge on the River Kwai) is mostly remembered today as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars. There are worse roles to be forever identified with. Sir Anthony Hopkins, the greatest living actor today, will have Dr. Hannibal Lecter chasing him beyond the grave.

I’m lucky. Ben Stone in Law and Order is something I can live with, although Our Lord did say that lawyers "heap on people pains and agonies which they themselves could not endure."

Fans can do that too, you know.

"A critic is a virgin who tries to teach a whore how to make love," said Tristan Bernard.

There’s no fan without a critic inside him or her.

As a devoted fan of Miles Davis, I refused to buy any of his fusion albums, when he married jazz and rock. Fusion was a sellout of the worst kind. I don’t think that way anymore. Now, for me at any rate, it’s "let Miles be Miles"… the same way it became "let Ronald Reagan be Ronald Reagan." That’s one of my platforms… kind of… for my campaign run for the presidency of the United States. Let individuals live their individuality. So long as they obey the Golden Rule, they should have no problem.

Grumpy fans? There are a lot of worse problems to have.

Ben Stone is catnip to an enduring set of female admirers. That Michael Moriarty really has little or nothing of Ben Stone left in him is… well… that’s the problem, I guess.

Ben Stone was a liberal… as I was, at the time I played him. But it’s true what they say, that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged.

At any rate, some of these Law and Order gossipers think I should be on medication. These labels of "bipolar," "manic-depressive" and "schizoid-affective disorder" irk me. A psychiatrist told me they’re "wastebasket phrases," so general they usually stem from complaints in the family about a member’s behavior. In the old days, children were described as "going through a phase." Now they’re forcibly put on Ritalin.

So, yes, there is a great difference between Ben Stone and Michael Moriarty. I thought most people would have gathered that about actors and their performances by now. I mean, would you really want Sir Anthony to be Hannibal the Cannibal?

"No," these girls might reply, "he was a monster!"

Right… and Ben Stone was a good guy… well, he was until Leonard called him a Robespierre… who was a really bad guy in the French Revolution. So I defended Ben Stone and reminded Leonard that the career of Law and Order’s producer Dick Wolf was marked by many purges of cast members. Indeed, it was more reminiscent of Robespierre than Ben Stone. The editorial, printed as a letter to the editor, caused an uproar among the Ben Stone fans. "Michael is destroying any chance of returning as Ben Stone… not to mention, he’s running for President of the United States… so he must be crazy!"

I first announced my intention to run for President in 1994, on my CNBC talk show A Life Without Fear. I’m not going through a phase obviously. Twelve years later, I’m still intent on entering the White House.

This particular editorial is not intended to defend my sanity in any way. Once the charge of insanity is made, "anything you say or do will be held against you." So it’s impossible to defend your sanity… and that is the reason the Soviet Union, when it couldn’t get political dissidents arrested because they’d broken no law, charged them with insanity, got one meek family member to sign the papers and institutionalize the troublemaker.

This editorial is to remind these ladies who admire Ben Stone of Michael Moriarty’s right to free speech. It appears that my anti-abortion stance, when read by some women, incites strong feelings in them, far beyond simple "fan disappointment." Ben Stone was always a Catholic on the show. What would you expect a Catholic to be? Pro-abortion? Senator John Kerry was excommunicated for supporting Roe v. Wade. He’s no longer allowed to say he’s a Catholic. I’ve been rejected in the entertainment business so often that it’s become a lifestyle unto itself.

Abortion is becoming as incipiently a cause for another Civil War as slavery was in the 1800s.

However, we’re still at the beginning of a world war, ladies. When all becomes fair as in love and war, psychiatry becomes utterly irrelevant. If the psychiatric lobby will not label the Koran and Islamist racial supremacism as a psychotic religion, which it is, then it will not resist when the New World Order encourages these same shrinks to diagnose political dissidents as "crazy."

Wolf once said I was the conscience of Law and Order. Well, I up and left the show and took my conscience with me to Canada. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms instituted by Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau actually protects my freedom of speech better than the tattered Bill of Rights in my former homeland of the USA. Now, with my fans reaching for the clichés like "Jesus freak," which I guess I am, the "thrall" which Abraham Lincoln said was put upon Americans by slavery has been injected into a few of my fans over their veiled defence of abortion.

New York Magazine did publish my rebuttal, and my right to engage in a debate with my critics from the Establishment was honoured. For that I’m grateful. I’ve ignored the Wolf spinoffs and the reruns. I would have continued to do so had someone not chosen to spit Wolf’s vindictive attitudes all over Ben Stone.

As my first wife said during our divorce: "If you don’t like my apples, stop shaking my tree!"