This is what you're fighting when you fight Prop 8: a video that connects gay marriage with Hitler. Wait, WHAT? Oh, it's a joke! You know! Funny! HA! HA! But as commenters observe, you can't mention Hitler and homos in the same breath without remembering what ACTUALLY happened in World War Two: fifty thousand gays imprisoned, with estimates of around 10,000 gays killed in concentration camps. HA! HA! HA!

We do adore offensive humor when it works, because it is so impressive an accomplishment. Jokes about dictators are a tempting challenge because the author must attain a level of humor sufficient to overcome the audience's horror. For example, the over-the-top relationship between Satan and Saddam on South Park is initially shocking, but we breathe a sigh of happy relief when it becomes outlandish -- just as we do during the gleeful "Springtime for Hitler." But for satire to be permitted to land its blow, it must be both devastatingly funny and devastatingly true. It must accomplish, as Henri Bergson said, a "temporary anesthesia of the heart."

This video, on the other hand, fails to land a single joke, fails to ring true, and so fails to numb its pain. The video is not only guilty of being unfunny, as are most of these Hitler re-dubs; it specifically evokes the inescapable real-life persecution and murder of thousands of gays in the Holocaust. By reminding us of Hitler's extermination campaign, it invites an elephant into the room and then abandons it. And the elephant is so massive, so horrifying, that it defies comprehension.

It is the cruelest of memories that could possibly have been evoked in this campaign. And it is beyond shameful. It is evil.

We certainly don't want to join this video in issuing a surrender via Godwin. But by evoking Hitler's murder of thousands of gays -- a genocide motivated by religious convictions -- it is impossible not to observe which side of this argument is more vulnerable to unflattering historical comparison. We would not stoop to insinuate such a comparison ourselves; it is a comparison that, through their actions, has simply insinuated itself.