> someone saying (potentially tasteless) jokes

A tasteless joke is not the worst you could do with speech. It would be, if hate speech, libel, defamation and incitement didn't exist.Americans like to pretend these are European inventions and not dangerous because historically, the most impressive/powerful American orators were progressive (for their times).

The first obviously. As an analogy, imagine if we let people use knives freely. They might kill other people with them! Can you imagine if such things were not regulated by the government? Now imagine, words. They are, as the saying goes, even more dangerous than swords. So we need laws to regulate their usage. This will bring us one step closer to true utopia.

False dichotomy.