Hate Speech

In a great article today in Townhall, Mark Adams tackles the issue of hate speech and helps to define what it truly is, in practical terms.

Hate speech is verbal communication that induces anger due to the listener’s inability to offer an intelligent response.

Because this inability to offer an intelligent response is due to one of two reasons, there are really two different types of hate speech: 1) Speech that is too dumb to merit an intelligent response, and 2) Speech for which the listener is too dumb to offer an intelligent response.

Adams then takes this working definition of hate speech and applies it to today's debate on Islam.