Anti-Climacus

WELL: Bill Wallo responds to the earlier-in-the-week "is this what democracy looks like?" with the following:

"Anti-Climacus wonders whether stupid slogans are an indication of what democracy looks like. I don't know. But they're an indication of what a free society looks like - where people are free to spout off at the mouth any stupid thing they want, and I'm free to slap them down hard (in a verbal sense, anyway). Free speech isn't without consequence (i.e., it really isn't "free"), and if you want to be stupid you should be ready for what comes."

But I'm not entirely sure I find this to be true. Abortion activists might be a bad example (we don't, generally, want to impugn their motives), so I'll switch to one that works a little better: the KKK or one of those neo-Nazi groups. A lot of people will tell you that if neo-Nazis want to march through Skokie (or whatever), they should be free to do it, and the rest of us (sane) folk should be free to decry them for being the idiots they are. But I don't think anyone would shed a tear if there were no more racists or anti-semites, and I don't know that we'd be any less free for having a couple largely objectionable and widely discredited sets of opinions out of the public sphere. Certainly, there are a lot of people who think it's perfectly acceptable to engage in collective social action to shut out these opinions (see the googlebombers below), or else engage in some kind of collective education which puts these viewpoints on the defensive, if it even introduces them as concepts at all.

I guess my question is this: if you believe there are some opinions that no one should have, and you think that it's okay to act collectively to try and stop people from forming those opinions, and you think at least some restrictions on free speech are acceptable (laws against inciting a riot or something similar), why wouldn't, say, the government (as an agent that expresses the will of the people (at least in theory) at least some of the time) be able to enact laws to further along society's goals*?

*Not, of course, directly making it illegal to say something-or-other, just sort of indirectly signalling that some set of beliefs isn't cool.