No one's going to jail for using slurs. The rhetoric around this has gotten really heated, especially given that we have many other actual problems (North Korea, global warming) we should be spending our energy on.

It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.