Jason Spencer is a Georgia State Representative in the Georgia House of Representatives.  A highly conservative Republican, he has a bit of a history in saying some provocative things.  No doubt knowing that Spencer had some pretty deplorable views, Sacha Baron Cohen, the man responsible for getting famous celebrities and political figures to expose their most base views as characters like Borat, Ali G, and Bruno, brought him onto his newest show to hopefully provoke an intense reaction out of Spencer.  In the bit, thinking he was involved in a training video by an Israeli soldier, Spencer gleefully exposed his rump while shouting racial and homophobic epithets.  Now, Spencer is claiming he was stricken by fear due to a previous exposure to terrorism and felt uncomfortable shouting those words…but if you watch the segment, that look of unadulterated joy at saying disgusting and bigoted phrases in a space he thought was going to be an echo chamber is hard to miss.  Now, obviously he wasn’t the only person taken in by Cohen and his act.  And indeed, many of the more conservative people Cohen has featured while in character, have loudly proclaimed that he tricked them into saying such unsavory and terrible things.

But the fact is that if your gut reaction to someone encouraging you to say something racist or homophobic is anything other than something along the lines of “No, I would not feel comfortable with that,”  than you kind of lose your right to complain about someone showing the world your willingness to do such things.