US Tea Party favourite and failed Republican Senate candidate gets up and leaves Piers Morgan's CNN talk show after he asks her about her views on gay marriage CNN

It is remarkably easy to make Tea Party celebrity Christine O'Donnell look foolish on television. Bill Maher did it: on Politically Incorrect, she admitted that she believes in witches, and was once seduced by a warlock. MTV did it: as a young activist, she told a documentary crew that she believes masturbation is adultery, thereby endowing the world with footage of Christine O'Donnell saying "masturbation", which we can air until the end of time. And now, Piers Morgan has figured out how to do it: ask her about her actual policies, specifically in regard to gay marriage. At which point, apparently, her preferred tactic is to throw a fit and run away.

The footage of her walk-out is supremely uncomfortable. "I'm interested in whether you support gay marriage," Morgan says. O'Donnell squirms, calls him "rude", and says that "I obviously want to talk about the issues that I choose to talk about in [my] book." She probably shouldn't have mentioned the book; when Morgan asks her whether it addresses gay marriage, she's forced to admit that, "yeah", it does. But when he asks her what the book says, she's forgotten her last statement: "What relevance is that?"

From there, it's just more squirming and nervous giggling, more circular statements, and finally, a question that seems to come out of sheer desperation: "Don't you think, as a host, if I say, 'this is what I want to talk about,' then that's what we should be talking about?" Morgan is forced to give O'Donnell the correct answer: "No." And she's gone.

It's such a stunning show of unprofessionalism and naivete – does O'Donnell, who has been in the public eye since the early 1990s, really expect that she can dictate all interview questions? – that some are speculating it may have been planned. It's true: O'Donnell managed to get out of the interview without giving a single quote on gay rights.

But this should not be allowed to detract attention from O'Donnell's toxic, bigoted beliefs. Her most definitive statement, throughout the interview, is that she hasn't "chosen to embrace" gay rights. She's right: notoriously, she accused Delaware Republican Mike Castle of being "unmanly", and her former consulting firm, Liberty.com released a video that contained the line, "isn't Mike Castle cheating on his wife with a man?" (They were not employed by O'Donnell at the time they released the video.) Speaking for her advocacy group, Salt – the same organisation for which she spoke when opposing masturbation – she argued, essentially, that people with Aids did not deserve a cure. She also fired Salt's spokesman on homosexuality for telling her that he didn't believe his homosexuality could be "cured".

This is far more serious than believing in witches. O'Donnell represents a lethally extreme strain of homophobia, which has many supporters, and O'Donnell has been open about this fact when in safe company. The fact that she backs off in less sympathetic environments only shows that hers is a policy of seduction – winning over as many people as possible before telling them that certain Americans deserve second-class status. It's both worthwhile and necessary to call that out, and Morgan has done us all a service.

But it would be a shame if this were only perceived as a case of someone getting Christine O'Donnell to look foolish on television. After all, that part is easy.