"Hate Speech" Legislation

After a lifetime of knowing the negative effect of hate speech, I now support the people's (not the government's) freedom to say what they please -- even if it is hateful. I'll try to explain why.
I now understand things I didn't when I was younger. Treatment of minorities (of all kinds) in America still has room for improvement, but things are a world better than they were in the 50's and 60's. What made that happen? It was education -- not legislation. Threats of punishment will temporarily force people to do something -- but only as long as force is applied. When people change their minds, you no longer have to force them.

Minorities are respected much more today than in the 50's and 60's. This is because speech was free (more or less). Minorities proclaimed their truths in the streets, with signs, with marches, in the churches, in the schools. They virtually "out-shouted" the "hate speech".

There was government legislation that helped, but most were laws against acts, not speech. It was laws like those that abolished segregation and discrimination in schools, in the workplace, etc. It was legislation that let the disease of ignorant discrimination (on all sides) be successfuly treated with the right medicines -- education and assimilation.

Now, an entire generation exists that finds it hard to imagine a time when blacks were not allowed to drink from the same water fountains as whites, Indians were not sold whiskey in a bar, and neither were allowed to date white girls.

It was not the restriction of anyone's speech that led to a reduction of hate speech -- it was the freedom of all speech. Such freedom, along with education is the only way to ensure political, economic and social justice for all.