That's the crux of the whole problem. The government passed unpopular policies and tried to morally "correct" its people from the top down. It seems most people gradually caught on and normalized those changes, but it isn't surprising to me at all that some/many didn't. I'm wholly on the side of civil rights, but lately I wonder about whether the experiment of using the federal government to try to bring together a big landmass full of people who too often really despise each other along ideological and/or ethnic lines is failing.
Here we are talking about curtailing free speech because the majority can sometimes be wrong and evil, which sounds fair, but that raises the question for me of whether constantly doing things that most people don't want in the name of social progress will create a stable society. I wish I was wrong, but I think not.