You miss the concept that gay marriage was controversial. Obama was against it. Therefore if that debate was held in the current environment proponents of gay marriage might be silenced and banned
That is the point, restricting speech isn't a good thing. The poster I replied to argued that restricting speech is a good thing since things are getting worse, even though we can see that things has steadily gotten better. There is no need to restrict speech to make things better, instead things are likely to get much worse by restricting speech as your example shows.
For the record, that is not at all what I was arguing.
I was arguing that completely unrestricted speech allows ideas that we really don't want (Nazism, etc) to become normalized.
This isn't even controversial; it's a well known phenomenon.
It's also very difficult to discuss this without talking about Trump and that instantly derails any conversation, but to address the elephant in the room, can you imagine even GW Bush saying "there were fine people on both sides"?
I also said that I don't know what the correct fix for that is.
I would say that the debate over transgender rights (bathrooms, etc) is in a similar cultural position to gay marriage a few years ago (i.e. liberals are fine with it, centrists are coming round to the idea and hardline conservatives are having a "moral panic"), yet no one is being silenced there.
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