i don’t know about your entitlement, but you might take a moment to consider whether your privilege is buffering you from the reality of the speech you seem to be defending.
hetro, white, middle-class, able-bodies males are the most buffered. whether or not you intersect with any or all of those categories, recognize your personal life experience will not always match the statistical experience of others.
when you say morals, i think mainly of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. and, while those may be deeply held beliefs – the belief in them, and the use hate speech to demonize others – they aren’t comparable things.
if you are saying maybe hate speech is a moral definition, it is not.
wikipedia, for instance, says this:
Hate speech is… speech that attacks a person or group on the basis of attributes such as gender, ethnic origin, religion, race, disability, or sexual orientation.
that definition requires no moral decision. it’s a behavior, not a belief.
any yet they still shape society.
i tried to provide some easily searchable rationales to say why. but, basically, the heart of it is – people use it to prey on other people. they use it to generate a class of “others”. they use it to encourage acts of emotional and physical violence, and it provides a certain level of noise in which even worse behaviors hide.
if you would like to expound on why you think hate speech doesn’t matter, or why you think my rationale is wrong, i would like to hear.
