The person who says a thing should be banned or avoided because it might be offensive is a liar.  He or she will be the first to justify giving offense to those he or she deems evil.  The person who says a thing should be banned or avoided because it is offensive is a person who desires control, who desires to offend and ultimately do violent to whomever he or she considers an enemy.

You can never offend me.  No one can offend you.  Taking offense is an act of ego, a choice you make to indulge your ego by having an emotional reaction to what you (wrongly) perceive others to think.  The only person who truly offends you is you.

So, you can never offend me.  You don’t have any access to the part of me which chooses whether or not to take offense, and I elect not to be offended.  I, meanwhile, will endeavor not to give you cause for offense—wantonly.  If I can’t say something which is both kind and true, I will generally keep my peace.  This is not because I can offend you, but because I know that you are weak and prone to taking offense given the slightest excuse, and I do not wish to prey on your weakness.  I wish to strengthen you in body and mind if I can.

That said, because your offense comes entirely from within yourself, you can choose to be offended by anything, and if I modify my behavior in order to prevent myself from causing you offense, you will recognize in that a lever of power which you can exert over me.  You will immediately recognize that you can control me by deciding which of my actions shall offend you.  The human animal—that same which is in you—is naturally cruel, abusive, and oppressive.  Given a lever of power over me, you will use it to abuse me.  First you will use it to keep me from speaking that which is true or living according to that which is true, and then you will use it to make me speak a lie or live according to a lie.  I must never encourage this evil in your nature nor give it currency in our society, so I will endeavor not to offend you until the moment you decide to use that as a lever to control me, at which point I will be actively contrarian.  I will speak the true thing at which you have chosen to take offense, loudly, directly, and force you to choose between tolerance and violence.

You are not unusual.  In any society, half of the population will use any available lever to oppress the other half.  This is the fundamental evil of democracy: power corrupts, and majorities have power.  There is nothing more lethal in the history of human civilization than a majority. And the offended, in any given society, are simply that portion which desire power over their neighbors but don’t have it yet.  Therefore, though kindness is always the order of the day morally for any individual, a free society will always be marked by its offended. If half the population naturally seeks control and power, then in a free society that half of the population must always be offended.  If they are not, then yours is not a free society. Unfree societies, of course, proceed immediately to atrocity and genocide. So, if you ever find a society in which less than half of the population is offended, it is probably because they have exterminated (or are in the process of exterminating) all those who do not live as they allow.