There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".
No one's going to jail for using slurs. The rhetoric around this has gotten really heated, especially given that we have many other actual problems (North Korea, global warming) we should be spending our energy on.
It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.
Right, separating the social contract from the gov't was what I was trying to point out.
"in my house" can be replaced with "on my website" or "in my restaurant" for most purposes. There's some stuff about monopolies and access guarantees to utilities.... but for most purposes the discussion is far from those cases I believe.
apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
> Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.