Is it art, a prank or a hate crime?

D. Parvaz from the Seattle Post Intelligencer, whose previous blog pissed a few people off, asks the question: "Is it art, a prank or a hate crime?"

A snippet:

I recently riled up some people when I blogged about what Paul Addis' motives might've been when he showed up at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral on Oct. 28, strapped with fireworks. Some took what I said to be a defense of church burning (it was not). It turned into such a really big deal that I wanted to learn a little more about the guy, who also prematurely burned the effigy of The Man at the Burning Man festival in Nevada (which has a huge base of participants from here) in August as a gesture of revolt. Was burning a church Addis' idea of art, a prank or (as some charged) a hate crime? The Burning Man stunt -- or the resulting backlash -- seems to have tugged at a loose thread in Addis' psyche, because over the next two months, Addis, 37, came unraveled.

Read the entire article here.