You are wrong. Free speech is guaranteed by the constitution.
Being polite, being decent to people, being responsive and adult about things that bother them; that isn't free speech.
That's called manners, being an adult, being mature, getting along with different kinds of people.
And that isn't guaranteed by the constitution - it's something that people as a community define the boundaries for.
Everyone has a slightly different opinion about what's 'too much' and what's 'funny' and what is 'going too far'.
Just because you think something is 'ok', that doesn't make it so.
The fact is, your definition of 'free speech ends when someone is offended', needs just a little bit of ammendment:
'Adults who have decent manners, can tell beforehand, in any given group they participate in, what is going to be offensive, and they avoid saying those things'.
The government gives people the right to free speech. It's ones upbringing and values that give a person manners.
We don't cuss like sailors in church. We go to the wharf. That's basically it. It's pretty simple. There is a place for certain kinds of speech and there is a time. We cursed like stevedores in college - when I pick up my nephew at daycare, I don't curse like a stevedore. Like I said, pretty simple.
I had a friend who for some reason in his quiet, way, just loved baiting people about their religious beliefs. He'd start a discussion about their religion, no matter what their religion was, and proceed to ridicule, in a very intellectual, distant and clever way, their beliefs. In college, it was considered deucedly clever and very, very entertaining.
Once we got out of college and went to work, the first place he worked, it was a bunch of college kids, basically, and it went on just like it had in college. We wore flip flops and t-shirts and jeans to work, and we curse like stevedores.
As the company grew and became more successful, such talk got less and less acceptable. We weren't just selling cheap software to college kids. We dealth with companies with devoutly religious leadership and they did not appreciate cussing. They did not appreciate off-color jokes, or racial remarks, or 'daring things' that were meant to be riske.
Things changed. We were around a very, very different group of people. They had very different expectations.
In other words, the only people that swore were the salesmen, and after a few years, even they had to stop.
One day, we were standing around and a secretary announced that she was going to have a baby. This was her third child. She was very excited about it.
This fellow, he snickered and said, 'All small children should be killed'.
She never spoke to him again. It wasn't long after that that he got fired.
He was indignant about that. He lamented about how free speech was gone and everyone was sooooo politically correct and he was just indulging in free speech.
I said, 'no, you weren't. You were doing what you do so often, which is be an unmitigated *******'. I explained that the world had changed around him, and he was still acting like he was in college. It wasn't just the off color remarks and baiting the religious people. He showed up when he wanted to, he dressed like a college kid, and he didn't get things done on the deadline.
If he wanted to get the advantages of being in that situation - the ninety thousand dollars a year salary, the perks, the intellectual stimulation and prestige of an engineering job, he had to fit in with the expectations of the group, not some other group from the past.
Basically, he was pretending he was someplace that he wasn't, any more. He wasn't around those people any more.
There is a difference between free speech (constitutional right) and being decent with people and respecting their feelings and preferences.
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