If we want to interact with other people, sooner or later we are going to have to take their sensitivities into account (however they came by them) if we want to avoid offending them.

I'd rather have people around me that are 'civilized' or 'sophisticated' enough to not get easily offended by someone outside of their environment. Actually, I prefer people who don't get offended that easily at all. The key is to just not take it personally.

I think that many of us would like PerlMonks to be a 'polite society', and I don't understand those who cannot (or will not) subsume their personal freedom of speech in favor of that goal.

I have underlined what I think is a mistake in that paragraph. If you consider a node, and want the consideration to go through because you think someone might be offended by that node, it's not your freedom of speech, it's not the voters freedom of speech, it's the freedom of those you're voting on. And seeing here that other monks seem to follow in dubio pro reo and try not to project their own morale standards makes this community even more fitting to my taste. By all means, remove trollings, by all means, remove spam. There are many examples of things which in my eyes justify removal or <beep>ing out parts. Worrying about peoples feelings is not on that list.