This is one of the dumbest lines of argument I've read here. On the level of "you can't punch a person, it's only their face that can get in the way of your fist." I'm getting all kinds of enlightened today.
Offense is taken, not given.
And if people on hiring committees, in fact just one person on each hiring committee, absorbed this by simply not having time and effort to expend to mentally challenge that assumption, you're pretty screwed, all philosophical arguments aside. Assuming you have to work for a living.
It's the people who are reacting back who are taking personal offense at what they perceive as an attempt to take away their freedom to casually demean people of the group they're not (yet) a part of.
The punch is liable to damage your body. The information, on the other hand, has to first be processed by your brain.
Because of this processing, you can even give something like this a try: simply notice and become curious about the feeling of offense that wells up inside of you, instead of allowing it to fully take you for a ride resulting in embarrassing comments on Hacker News.