We need routes to ensure safety and respect for everyone. If someone makes others feel endangered, it is not unreasonable for there to be immediate recourse and resolution. That's what a Code of Conduct is all about.
The Swing dancing scene had a big scandal this year, and everywhere CoCs are popping up.
But do you really need to write down that an adult (quite old, in that case) dance teacher is not allowed to sleep with just-teenage dance students? Or that racist remarks are not welcome?
No, so you adopt very broad language. Usually something like "harassing", "making uncomfortable" etc.
If your community needs those two sentences to police such behaviour, you've got a much bigger problem.
I simply don't believe that you can convince anybody to take action because some very broadly written CoC authorizes them to do so. They either see that the behaviour is a problem, and are willing to act, or they will just start to debate whether the CoC's specific wording is really covering the behaviour in question.
Then again, I have zero practical experience with policing a community.
Damn! Missed midnight. :-)
So there are really two options: one, hope the community stops existing or stops having influence (unlikely), or two, accept that, yes, we do need to spell out every little detail about behavior as if people don't know appropriate behavior on their own.
Nobody advocating detailed codes of conduct particularly likes the fact that they are necessary. But how you feel about the situation that led up to them doesn't really affect whether they are in fact necessary.
I run an organization (hypatia.software [Hypatia Software Organization]) where the Code of Conduct is enforced and it is effective.
In the end, it's probably equivalent to your answer. Because when the people in your organization feel someone is harassing people and you decide to kick him out, you're probably simply describing his behaviour and referencing your CoC, but not doing some detailed analysis how and why he did so.
Personally, I tend to steer on the side of a broadly defined CoC backed up with a very clear dispute resolution policy (there's plenty of examples of both of these - Debian has a pretty decent set for large projects). In a functioning community, reaching for this should only be required very rarely, so they shouldn't affect anyone most of the time - and they quite obviously don't in the case of open-source projects, or we'd hear about actual cases where people have been kicked out of projects for very little a lot more than we do.
That's a bit stretching it basic threat, management is to judge each threat agent by the level of intent and the ability to act on that intent for the most part the usually aholes don't pose any actual threat. I also don't understand why some one being an ahole for a specific reason is worse than some one being an ahole just for sake of being an ahole, we all had our nemeses over the years people that you just don't click with that do everything in their power to get to you - outplay them, ignore them or move on.