Clearly a video that will gain traction– Oklahoma State Legislator Sally Kern goes on a rant: “Homosexual Agenda is Destroying America.” Gays are a worse threat than terrorists and– gasp!– Islam. This is the stock & trade of Internet hilarity, and one can hear the inevitable trance mashups before they’re rendered.

Other than its grotesque nature, I’ve posted this video because I’m interested in its central contradiction– from what I gather, this speech? was recorded secretly and is distributed by an LGBT activist group, who’ve added titles & photographs of people holding handmade signs that denounce Kern’s message.

I am fascinated by the text coming at 1:55 and reading, “Hate speech affects us all.”

There’s ambiguity in that– what exactly does “affect” mean?– but I think the most obvious, and probably correct, interpretation is that hate speech is an offensive tool with Real Consequences. My lifelong masquerade as Whitey Straightman may render me congenitally unable to grasp this idea– a well-loved refrain of identity politics– but I have never believed it. For the life of me, I’ve always thought that the best way to combat an opposing (and therefore wrong) viewpoint has been to let the other person talk and talk and talk until they’ve hanged themselves. This is, in fact, the dynamic at work in the video– added text and photographs notwithstanding.

Joseph Mitchell knew this approach well– some of the best pieces in Up in the Old Hotel are those wherein idiots are revealed by their own words, desperately murdered by a human desire to be heard.

(Hi. I have a blog.)