Take it up with governments around the world which routinely limit free speech.
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Pop over to Germany and exercise your free speech opinion that the holocaust was a hoax
Yes, there are sadly too many governments paving the way to fascism by restricting speech where there is no valid evidence of harm caused by the speech itself. Emotional effects of speech can never cause harm in itself to the listener. The listener has total power over all emotional and psychological impact of the speech on them. While the courts have on rare occasions ignored this scientific reality, it is always a dangerous and regrettable thing when they do.
Try defaming someone rich and see whose side courts take.
You are begging the question there. 99.99999% of the time, highly offensive and insulting things are said about rich and powerful people and it is not defamation and they have no legal recourse.
Defamation is not a crime in any reasonable system, and not a crime in the US. No one can go to jail for defaming another person. Defamation is a purely civil issue, and something one party must sue another party for in a claim of tangible injury. The speech must be specifically and explicitly directed at the individual claimant in the suit. In most states the claimant must prove that what was said is objectively false, meant to be taken literally and seriously (not as mockery or satire), and that it was said publicly in a manner that caused other people to alter the actions towards the claimant in a way that harmed them financially.
IOW, they must prove what cannot be proven even in 99.99% of instances of the most offensive, insulting speech you can imagine.
With most offenses, its not even a possibility that it can be defamation because what was said is a purely subjective opinion that can never be true or false. IOW, and opinion that "Person X is an ugly, stupid, fat, immoral, scumbag, who shouldn't be trusted, and he only has sex with naive girls that he can manipulate into bed." can never be defamatory because it is pure opinion and none of those traits have objective referents against which they can be shown to be false.
And even false statements are not defamatory when said about people that are known to the general public. The courts have ruled that it must be proven that the speaker knew their claims were false and said them with malice to harm the person.
Finally, what theists say about atheists on a regular basis is objectively more defamatory than just about everything that has ever led to a defamation suit. They say that atheists are thought by the supreme creator of all moral goodness to be so evil that they will suffer for eternity. That is actually not a matter of personal opinion. It is mutliple assertions of fact that are objectively true or false. Whether a person is actually evil is a matter of opinion, but whether they are thought to be evil and will be punished by the creator of all moral goodness is either true or not. And, any rational analysis suggest that it is almost certainly false and there is no reasonable basis for the speaker to ever think it is true.
It is an idea that causes real tangible harm to atheists, has cost them jobs, promotions, income, etc..
Yet, no atheist would ever win a defamation lawsuit against a theist for such slander. This shows both how hard it is to sue someone even when the speech is technically defamation, and it shows why it should be nearly impossible, because even with those criteria, it is applied in such an arbitrary and subjective way, where offensive slander said in the guise of religions get a free pass because we are supposed to just expect such things from worldviews that are founded in made up lies and hatred (aka all Abrahamic religions).
