It's All In Your Head

Here's another story I missed this weekend. Several anti-gay preachers decided to attempt to get arrested by... preaching on the corner of 10th and Pennsylvania. The predictable failarity ensued.

Turns out, if you want to perpetrate an act of civil disobedience, you have to do something illegal. And preaching on a street corner isn't illegal! Imagine that - in America, it's legal to say something on a street corner! It's almost as if there's some bedrock Constitutional concept that allows people to speak freely, some sort of "free speech" thing...

The preachers were trying to protest the new hate crimes law, which puts the preachers in a bind vis-a-vis their attempt at civil disobedience. See, the point of civil disobedience is to protest an unjust law by breaking that law and portraying yourself as a sympathetic lawbreaker. But to break the hate crimes law, the preachers would have had to commit an actual hate crime - like beating up a gay guy while screaming Bible verses at him or something. Which, yeah, doesn't exactly make you sympathetic. Future conservative preachers, perhaps, might want to learn the law before they try to challenge it.

Bonus fail points: at one point toward the end of the event, the podium got hijacked by some of the pro-gay rights counterprotesters. So not only did the preachers completely misunderstand the law and fail at getting arrested, they gave their opponents a soapbox while they were at it.

Bonuser bonus fail points: Oh, and the guy they hired to do the sound donated the fee for the podium to the gay rights activists. So not only did they fail at getting arrested, not only did they give gay rights activists a platform to speak, but they also paid gay rights activists for the opportunity to do so. (Dayenu?)

Facepalms all around.

And a link to the video for the song mentioned in the post title, featuring Martin Sheen as an eccentric preacher.