> Reasonable is an entirely subjective quality

Is it?

Consider these two responses someone might make to this sentence:

(1) In discussion where clear examination and exchange of relevant ideas matters most, we make distinctions all the time between reasonable discourse and unreasonable discourse. Students of rhetoric distinguish between ethos, pathos, and logos. Practitioners of logic distinguish between sound and fallacious reasoning. And as I'm pointing out yet again here, the legal field already makes any number of distinctions regarding how speech functions that are related to the degree to which it is protected or not protected.

(2) Your clear failings in this discussion mark you as an irredeemable utter piece of shit, an overconfident idiot who is fit for nothing better than to be dragged out of your house, beaten on livestream to people laughing at you while those watching send in messages of proper encouragement those beating you, until finally someone finally extracts the only worthwhile thing that can come out of the pathetic gray matter inside your skull: marry it to the pavement like Jackson Pollock did with paint and canvas. And the world will be a better place in every way. In fact, the sooner we get rid of people like you, the better.

Which is more reasonable discourse? #1 or #2? I think it's pretty clear that it's #1. I certainly wouldn't consider #2 a contribution to reasonable discourse as anything other than a hyperbolic counterexample. HN guidelines would make that kind of distinction as well (and in fact, even though it should be clear that #2 is a hyperbolic counterexample, it may carry enough baggage that I may have run afoul of the guidelines anyway... but of course, as an ardent defender of absolute speech rights, presumably you're not one to appeal to such guidelines?).

Do you really think that's an entirely subjective distinction? I think consensus is broad enough that it could be said to be objective on a human scale.

Some forms of speech aren't discursive exchanges of ideas.

> The fact that you believe you have some position of authority to dictate to others how they should “fix their thinking”, so that their thoughts are somehow more correct

You know it's possible to be wrong about something, right? You can need your thinking fixed about whether you understand force vector diagrams sufficiently well to use them as tools to get accurate insights into relevant physics, or as most on this forum should know, you can need your mental model of a program corrected by a compiler (or a second pair of eyes). And one might even need their understanding of the values and dynamics involved in free speech issues corrected.

So while we're talking about character in this discussion, let's observe that you're the first person to invoke it with a general ad hominem, on top of this weird idea that your thinking can't be broken.

The idea that thinking can be broken is directly tied up with the main reason why free speech matters. If any idea is just as good as any other idea, if any attempt to bring them into a value framework is purely subjective, then no robust exchange of ideas matters.

> Of course, please feel free to explain to me why none of that speech was reasonable in the first place. Perhaps you could enlighten me with some correct thinking.

If you're looking for enlightenment regarding Hammond, you could start by reading the court case and/or proceedings behind relevant law. Believe it or not, reasoned examination of social philosophy and law is something that can happen in the courts and legislative bodies. If you don't believe that happened here, you could try engaging with the court's reasoning.

But we don't have to involve that much work to start addressing issues in play. If you're particularly dismayed by the prospect of some fundamental human activity like speech being policed or outright curtailed by the law (or even by the suggestion that that it should be) then it should be easy for you to see why Hammond's sign was immediately problematic. It enters a similar assertion regarding sexuality.

Now, you can say "well, the antidote if any for that is more speech" and maybe that's true in many cases. But context matters in at least two ways here: first, the history of legal restrictions and informal violence related to homosexual activity. "Stop homosexuality" takes on a particular character when we're still in living memory of cases like Alan Turing's.

And the other contextual point has to do with the question I entered this discussion with: what's been lost? What can you literally not talk about? Are there no venues in which one can elaborate on desirable vs undesirable dynamics related to homosexuality specifically or sexuality in general? Or even in which it can't be proposed that it might be legally restricted? I'm going to bet the answer is no. Situational curtailing of some forms discourse in some forums is distinct from an attack on diversity of thought.

But let's say it was. Does a society that can't talk about elimination of homosexuality lose anything in particular? Anything that isn't comparable to the loss of a social capacity to talk about the question of whether practice of Judaism (or Christianity, or Islam) should be "stopped" (since, presumably, you're concerned about the exercise of religious liberty)?

> Here’s another person receiving a wrongful arrest payout for exactly the same crime

The article doesn't seem to give enough information to determine whether or not the exact same crime was committed. Do you have other information?