What I find most difficult is having to defend from the assumption that my defense of speech means that I agree with the speech. This is untrue and a non sequi

What I find most difficult is having to defend from the assumption that my defense of speech means that I agree with the speech. This is untrue and a non sequitur. I can't stand Nazis. I'm not white and they'd harm me, if given opportunity to do so. They are truly horrible people. As horrible as they are, they still deserve basic human rights up until they violate the law. We don't preemptively punish people. We don't take rights away without due process. We operate with the assumption of innocence until proven guilty. Well, we used to... So, when I stand up for the rights of the deplorable, I'm assumed to be a deplorable. Never mind that I'm standing up for the rights of all, I'm now counted as one of the deplorable. And defending against that takes some time. To be fair, I didn't have anything better to do, most of the time. Still, I've had this conversation so many times that I could probably script it and automate it. Seriously, a sibling post noticed that I have this verbiage figured out. They aren't the first to notice. I've been having this same conversation since before the Internet was world wide. Someone has to stand up for free speech while not actually being deplorable. It's more tasteful to hear it from me than to hear it from a KKK Grand Wizard. The reception is much better, put it that way. ;-)