And how would it be surprising? Of course people will have a tendency to favor laws that benefit them. So if hate speech is directed at you, you’re obviously more likely to clamor for laws banning hate speech. Doesn’t mean that you should be the one deciding what laws should be implemented. Rather the contrary actually. Being victimized makes you partial and biased, and handing the decision over what the punishment should be for reckless driving to the parents of a child who was killed by a reckless driver, for instance, doesn’t strike me as a great idea.
Certainly, the peculiarity of hate speech (or discrimination and such) is that a large part of the population is guaranteed (or almost guaranteed) to not be victim of it (while anybody can have a child killed by a reckless driver, so the potential risk exist, even if people will probably ignore it until it happens). At least for some values of “hate speech”, since I fundamentally disagree with the concept that the “majority” (quote marks because in the case of women they’re in fact the majority) can’t be victimized (no reverse sexism, no reverse racism, etc…) and even more so with the idea that laws should be different for different categories of citizens (assuming even that you could objectively define your categories, which you often can’t). So the archetypal white straight person has little personal incentive to restrict hate speech. I would however note that people don’t exist in a vacuum. They have a black girlfriend, a gay nephew, a Muslim sister-in-law, a Jewish friend and of course a mother. It’s not like they’re all going to be utterly unconcerned by and totally unaware of the issues those people face.
However, while it’s possible to address some discrimination issues by constraining measures that have little effects on society at large (for instance forcing a landowner to rent his apartment to a black tenant), free speech is a cornerstone of democracy. There’s no democracy, and little possible freedom without free speech. I would say that freedom of speech is significantly more important than the right to vote, for instance. Anything that erodes it is highly dangerous. And has unintended (or sometimes intended but not advertised ) consequences. And freedom of speech is highly fragile, and not a simple, obvious yes/no question like the right to vote. The overwhelming majority of people don’t support free speech and wonder all the time why this or that speech is tolerated when it’s so offensive, so ridiculous, help the terrorists or whatever. But then, every single idea we hold dear came to fruition because of free speech. Because there had been people who kept advocating against fierce opposition and demonization for the liberty to express ideas that pretty much everybody else and pretty often also themselves were finding repugnant or stupid. People who also fully realized that if you banned their terribly offensive and totally misguided speech today, your absolutely correct and sensible speech will be banned tomorrow.
Think of an organization like the ACLU and how much it has done to preserve and advance liberties. You might think OK, but if the ACLU had only supported the good causes and refused to support the bad ones, the result would have been the same. Except that if the ACLU had operated under such premises, it might not have defended the Klu Klux Klan views, but it might not have defended the homosexuals views, or the communist views, either. Because its members would have found all these causes equally worthless and morally indefensible. These progresses happened only because supporters of free speech agreed to defend all form of speech, whether or not they thought they had any redeeming values.
Believing that you can determine what is worth protecting and what isn’t means that you assume you own the truth. That your values and views are the ultimate, definitive ones, indisputable and eternal. Which is what generation after generation, all your predecessors have thought while implementing slavery or hunting the reds. Which is what would make your great grandchildren laugh if they weren’t so infuriated that you could utter such horrible and obviously wrong and immoral statements.
So, what I said is that yes, obviously, some groups will be victimized by hate speech and other groups mostly not. But also that freedom of speech has been and still is fundamental and indispensable. And that it cannot be “partially” protected. That no individual or group, regardless how totally convinced they are to be right has any legitimate claim to determine what speech is worth keeping and what speech isn’t. And finally that even if they were able to, any assault again free speech by banning “unworthy” speech will favorise the subsequent ban of supposedly “worthy” speech.
What does it mean? It means that yes, I’m willing to sacrifice the interests of some people (and I very likely won’t be one of them) to protect an institution that I find absolutely fundamental and irreplaceable. Call them “acceptable casualties”, if you wish. But this isn’t exactly an unique example. I’m also willing to sacrifice the interest of other victims (and this time, I could be one of them) to maintain a due process of law and protect the rights of the accused, for instance. Which is also something that regularly comes under attack.