Vorderbrueggen: Speech may be despicable, but is it hate?

When Mark Wassberg walks to the public speaker's podium at Richmond City Council meetings, most of the board and the audience seem to flinch as though they are about to receive sharp blows to the head.

A whack on the temple with a baseball bat may be preferable.

Wassberg's loathsome, nauseating, ignorant, homophobic rants at council meetings in the past few months are despicable.

As gay and lesbian teens from the RYSE Youth Center sat in the chairs behind him, Wassberg spewed bile about what he called their "filthy, disgusting and immoral" lives.

Gay youth "jump off bridges because they know what they are doing is wrong," said Wassberg, with a laugh that can only be described as demonic.

He crowed about the troubles of a young transgender woman who fought to participate in a beauty contest. And if a gay child is bullied and hangs himself, "that's how it goes. If you live like that, what do you expect?" he said.

He even point-blank asked each of the seven members of the council, "Are you gay?"

It's no wonder Mayor Gayle McLaughlin wants to shut him down. No decent human being wants to wash in a bath of verbal sewage week after week.

But the mayor may be walking a razor-thin line between her job to enforce reasonable rules of decorum and a duty to protect her constituents' right to free speech.

McLaughlin opens public comment periods with a warning: If you spout hate and refuse to stop, she will declare

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Vorderbrueggen: Speech may be despicable, but is it hate?