Shortly after Election Day in 2008, I received a phone call into our newsroom from a woman asking why we were carrying a speech by newly-elected President Barack Obama. She called to ask me why, as a FOX affiliate, we were carrying a speech by a liberal Democrat who -- somehow she was able to make this judgment within just a few short days -- would doom our country with radical idealism.

She sounded very educated to me. I don't remember what I said in response to her question, but I do remember how she ended the phone conversation: She told me she honestly felt within her heart that President Obama was the anti-Christ.

Woah. That's when I knew some of our viewers were a little off.

And some of them still are. Take, for example, the tea partiers, who seem to herald FOX News and local FOX affiliates -- whether they're owned by FOX's parent company News Corporation or not…we are not, by the way -- as the "voice of truth" in this country. It troubles me to think my colleagues and the station I work for are being aligned by reputation with citizens of our country who choose to protest against higher taxes by displaying signs such as this:

Good comparison. Hitler, after all, was a man who led the invasion of twenty-one European countries and ordered the building of six concentration camps in Poland where the systemic execution of nearly six million people of Jewish faith and three million Russian prisoners of war (including over one million children) took place.

Obama, on the other hand, helped pass health care reform and broke a few promises along the way.

It bothers me to think that the honor of nearly nine million people who were casualties of an evil regime is currently being desecrated by right-wing extremists who feel the need to compare our President to a mass murderer. The only reason they're doing it is for shock value. And if that's the only reason, anyone who holds a sign comparing our President to Adölf Hitler should be ashamed of themselves.

But we do live in America, where speech like that -- which, in my mind, is similar to that of the kind of demonstrations held by the Reverend Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church -- is fully protected under our Constitutional right to speak and express ourselves freely. With that in mind, I think Democratic Congressman Barney Frank of Massachusetts had the best retort when faced by someone calling our President a Nazi politician:

"You stand there with a picture of the President, defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of bio-contemptable nonsense is so freely propagated…I am gonna revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time?"

Photo courtesy Anne-Lyne Bancalin, appears under a Creative Commons license