"The Culture Of Shut Up"
Former Obama speechwriter Jon Lovett, in an unfortunately overly long piece in The Atlantic, makes some great points about the problem with "The Culture of Shut Up" -- the chill on free speech:

The trouble, I think, is when ostracizing a viewpoint as "beyond the pale" becomes not an end but a means to an end; that by declaring something unsayable, we make it so. It makes me uncomfortable, even as I see the value of it. I for one would love homophobia to fully make it on that list, to get to the point where being against gay marriage is as vulgar and shameful as being against interracial marriage. But it isn't. Maybe it will be. But it isn't. And kicking a reality-show star off his reality show doesn't make that less true. Win the argument; don't declare the argument too offensive to be won. And that's true whether it's GLAAD making demands of A&E or the head of the Republican National Committee making demands of MSNBC.

The bottom line is, you don't beat an idea by beating a person. You beat an idea by beating an idea. Not only is it counter-productive--nobody likes the kid who complains to the teacher even when the kid is right--it replaces a competition of arguments with a competition to delegitimize arguments. And what's left is the pressure to sand down the corners of your speech while looking for the rough edges in the speech of your adversaries. Everyone is offended. Everyone is offensive. Nothing is close to the line because close to the line is over the line because over the line is better for clicks and retweets and fundraising and ad revenue.

It's like a financial bubble. It's a bubble of subprime outrage and subprime apologies. I just hope we can rationalize the market before this chilling effect leaves us with a discourse more boring and monotone than it already is--a discourse that suits the cable networks and the politicians but not the many disparate voices who occasionally need to say outrageous things because there are outrageous things to say.

And there are real consequences to the outrage bubble. When Congress was debating the debt ceiling, one of the sticking points was a set of changes to the military-pension system. You don't even have to take a position on these changes to say that it's a reasonable debate: whether we should save money in the defense budget by reducing the rate of increase in pension benefits received by veterans who are younger than retirement age.

The bottom line is, you don't beat an idea by beating a person. You beat an idea by beating an idea.
Agree, disagree, you're not crossing the line, right? Wrong: Supporting this proposal is described, over and over again, as "sick" and "obscene" and "offensive." Do we really want to make policy this way? Do we want our already timid and craven elected officials to have even more to fear?

I'll be honest: In my own small way I feel the chilling effect. I'm in a fortunate position that nobody really cares what I say, but even so, occasionally I'll make a dumb joke on Twitter and the next thing I know it's on a whole bunch of conservative websites that exist to catch liberals crossing the line. As much as I can pretend otherwise, I'd be lying if I said it didn't make me hold back just a little, doubt myself a little, on occasion. And while it's hard to measure the absence of speech, measure the things unsaid, I have little doubt that others on all sides are feeling the same chilling effect, only more so because people do care what they have to say.