Criminalize racist and bigoted words?

Absolutely not! Freedom of Speech is a guaranteed right. We have etiquettes on what's proper to say and those expectations are to be set up by society, not governments. If you go around saying or advocating very rascist things, hopefully, most people will choose to ignore you.

Criminalize gestures too!

joko104 said:

On another thread it has been brought up that some schools are taking punitive actions students they discover use the "N" word on the Internet. If young people should be punished for using racist or bigoted words, obviously adults should.

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The words are just the more blatant demonstration of what they are really being punished for: bigoted actions and attitudes which reflect very poorly on their respective schools and violate those schools' codes of conduct.

joko104 said:

Should racist and bigoted words and expressions be outlawed?

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Of course not, and I don't see any significant effort to attempt any such outlawing. Racist and bigoted language is quite common (as a few minutes' worth of searching on these very fora will quickly reveal).

There is a clear and obvious difference between raising sound objections to racism and bigotry on one hand vs. trying to make them go away magically through outlawing some small portion of the expressions of that racism and bigotry.

Racism and general bigotry (including but not limited to racism) infuriate me, but I'd rather it remain the case that bigots and ideologically committed racists feel comfortable enough to announce themselves. No honest cause is ever helped by trying to sweep things under the carpet or pretend them away outright.

joko104 said:

On another thread it has been brought up that some schools are taking punitive actions students they discover use the "N" word on the Internet. If young people should be punished for using racist or bigoted words, obviously adults should.

Should racist and bigoted words and expressions be outlawed?

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VERY interesting question. Outlawing them would not only violate the 1st amendment, but would not solve the reasons for their existence either. In school it should be taught that it is in bad taste to use them, so school punishment is a good idea, but outside school, it should be punished only in conjunction with other crimes, as is by the current law.

joko104 said:

On another thread it has been brought up that some schools are taking punitive actions students they discover use the "N" word on the Internet. If young people should be punished for using racist or bigoted words, obviously adults should.

Should racist and bigoted words and expressions be outlawed?

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There are probably three points that merit attention here:

1) Schools, I think, should reasonably be able to punish students for utilizing racist/bigoted language while they're in school.
It's been the case for quite a long time that students in school don't actually have precisely the same rights as adults do, and there are generally good reasons for that. This can get extremely complicated.

2) What students do when they're not in school is the business of no one besides their parents, and (if they're doing something illegal) the relevant authorities. Schools very emphatically should not be punishing students for things that they've done when not in school.

3) Obviously criminalizing language (as used by adults, in general) is constitutionally impossible (excepting, e.g., solicitation, defamation, etc), and that's a good thing.

No...people need to put their adult pants on when bigotry enters...they have a right to say it and we have a right to tell em to **** off