"my grandfather and my father and I all cursed God for breakfast for three generations and now I suddenly have to talk like what this pope-kissing bigots want me to?" ignores that there are pope-kissing bigots in your society, your neighbor may be one, your friendly policemen may be well one, the old man across the street.
But also, there are people who are not pope-kissing bigots and YET behave themselves in a way to not saw division. Your children's school teacher may be one, perhaps cursing in the privacy of her home but giving you a look you if your children talk like little fallen angels.
We're all used to norms. I don't think that's the root cause of us having this conversation in the first place.
There is a group of people who is feeling their position in society has changed under their feet and they are frustrated about that. For them these topics become an identity-glue, something to hold on and to tell their ingroup from outgroups.
But there are also people who just don't like norms and just by coincidence happen to be aligned with whoever is the norm-breaker du jour.
> To me people who cling their freedom to utter words that a significant portion of their fellow compatriots find offensive, look exactly like that. Picking a silly battle, and entrenching themselves.
We're not talking about people who "cling to their freedom" to say what they want to everyone. We're dealing with a group that used language allowed by its local culture, that suddenly got in the spotlight, and now the rest of the world is trying to pressure them into conforming to the norms used elsewhere. To riff of your example, it's like the wide world suddenly noticed Tuscany is a place, and decided to condemn people living there for insulting the Christian god on a regular basis.
I mention this point because, in my observation, this was a common pattern in on-line communities, particularly around forceful introduction of Codes of Conduct. Outsiders would enter a niche community, take public offense at the local language norms, mobilize a wider Internet crowd, and force the community to change their norms under threat of heaps of negative publicity. To me, this kind of behavior reeks of... colonialism.