If someone says they don't want millions of illegal immigrants pouring into the country, are they "rallying for causes that marginalize, harass, and remove rights from others?" If someone says they don't support gay marriage on religious grounds, are they engaging in hate speech?

What issue is free from being percieved as an attack on someone else?

Want to put price controls on rent? You're stampeding on property rights. You are marginalizing landlords!

Want to create a company and hire people you want to hire? You're discriminating against those you don't want to hire.

So on, and so forth. All contentious issues involve granting the advantage to one party over another. That's why they are incendiary.

If we don't have free speech, then people will go underground and you'll have subterranean political battles with a banal surface counterpart. In other words, public speech will become completely insincere and everyone will be holding a knife behind their back while they wear big gregarious smiles and say the nicest things.

This has already happened. Free speech has already been effectively eliminated by dumbing down the population. We cannot expect any nuanced public debate. All political speech is reduced to slogan after slogan, "hope and change," laws that have catchy names like "the Patriot act," etc.

It's practically already gone and the underground pressure that one would expect in such a dysfunctional political climate is already at an eruption point.

I don't know what free speech means when most people are too stupid to understand anything above grade school level.