The Supreme Court of the United States has lineated exceptions to 1st Amendment Free Speech. These limits are very, very narrow. They include obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, true threats, and speech integral to already criminal conduct. As you can see, hate speech is not listed.
Hate speech is free speech. This is the legal truth. There is absolutely no 1st Amendment exception allowing a government to punish hate speech. The danger with punishing hate speech is that what is hateful is opinion-based. When a government gets to make subjective decisions about our speech, we run the risk of being silenced for opinions that the government simply does not like. When a government censors what they do not like, we no longer live in a democracy.
