Indeed, it is precisely when ideas are unpopular that they require First Amendment protection.
Popular notions require little protection.
If the most exquisitely and deliberately sensitive could constrain the speech of others, free speech disappears. On college campuses around, Conservatives find their publications vandalized and Conservative speakers shouted down. At times when Ward Connerly, the black Conservative who fights against racial preferences, visits college campuses at the invitation of Conservative groups he finds not his ideas challenged, but his right to speak them preempted by those with the childish attitude that whoever bellows the loudest wins the argument. Now that Conservatives discover their expressions and associations assaulted by attempts at suppression, they find themselves, perhaps uncomfortably, calling upon the same jurisprudence litigated in a different environment. Although some on the Left remain true to their conviction that the First Amendment is a shield, too many others find it an inconvenient obstacle in cleansing discourse of objectionable ideas.