I think we are all on the same page as far as reasoning with people who are there in good faith to debate, and who are not engaging in intimidation, inflammatory tactics, personal attacks, and the like.
The original post addressed this by saying rational discourse is certainly allowable, but so is shunning,
‘depending on the seriousness or severity of the situation: I can argue with people who make such comments and challenge them on their beliefs, refuse to associate with them, publicly critique or condemn them, alert other people about their behavior, try to convince others to not tolerate them, and/or I can refuse to tolerate people who choose to tolerate people who express intolerance toward me. All of these actions fall well within my rights — they are expressions of “free speech,” if you will.’
The idea of reasoned debate does not take into account the cognitive biases that many (maybe most?) human brains have. For example, people were asked to read a neutrally-presented news article, and then were exposed to either civil or uncivil comments (the arguments in the comments were the same, just expressed in more or less rude ways). People exposed to more rude arguments tended to have a more polarized opinion about the news piece, and that polarization mirrored their pre-existing religious or risk-perception beliefs.
In other words, if you you get exposed to hateful speech, you are less likely to listen to reasoned arguments, and more likely to dig further into your pre-existing biases. ( http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12009/full ).
Second, “speech” does not only apply to reasoned discourse. Speech includes hearing ‘fuck outta my way you fucking faggot” every day. That’s protected speech, but I certainly don’t need to reason with it. Speech includes something like Milo’s stunt that outed a trans individual in a public lecture hall, for no apparent reason than to belittle her. How do you reason with that? How do you reason with death threats and rape threats on Twitter, or on the public comments to your Facebook, or Medium?
Speech includes promoting your position of “peaceful ethnic cleansing” (which itself *can* be reasoned with, if it’s merely published in a paper, say) by staging a torch-march reminiscent of KKK meetings, and by having militia formations in front of a synagogue. Those particular manifestations of speech are meant to intimidate, not to persuade by reason.