It takes guts to shut down free speech? Regardless of one's opinion on homosexuality, shutting down debate is not the way to deal with the issue.
Debate we must. The concept of free speech has been driven to absurd lengths that are ultimately destructive to a free society. Struggles to reestablish organic social limits on harmful speech will become increasingly urgent around the world as the burgeoning of 24/7 media relentlessly promotes collective hedonism instead of private responsibility.
When the freedom of speech concept was written into our Founding, our nation already self-policed speech in the private sector. It was a free society, but one in which the vast majority freely practiced various denominations of Western religious morality, with strict punishments for economic and moral slackers, scant welfare provisions and a strong republican system allowing local governments to enforce community standards.
Sexual behaviors divorced from legal responsibility for marriage and family result in neglectful, deteriorated or absent ties not only between parents, but also between them and their biological offspring — social trends that have sharply spiked following the liberalization of speech and obscenity rulings.
Pieties of this atheist legal religion obligate taxpaying citizens to assume the economic burden not only of carelessly spawned, unwanted children, but also of their biological parents, foster parents and a costly administrative network of social services, failed contraceptive theories, deteriorated public health and a holocaust of abortions.
There are forms of speech that do damage. I believe there will be many experiments around the globe attempting to limit speech. The clumsy "politically correct" and "hate speech" agendas are one such attempt, which ultimately protects hedonism and dependence on government rather than expecting personal responsibility. The pendulum must swing back, or freedom of conscience is doomed.
Socialist/feminist/fascist trends relentlessly separate biological parents from their rights and responsibilities for the care of their own young, placing children at the mercy of adult exploitation, both sexual and political. Destroying the family degrades the quality of the citizens we are producing. Libertine social trends reward the strongest, richest, prettiest, sexiest and most influential players at the expense of the youngest, oldest, poorest, most economically self-sufficient and most vulnerable. It is a social devolution that elevates the primitive instincts over the classical Western virtues.