Your framing of Ely's justification for the 1st Amendment did not make it clear that you wouldn't support banning speech you find particularly egregious. I'm happy to have been wrong.
Ely wouldn't either. The point is that 1A protects the political process, not a natural right we have to express ourselves; thus the distinction between government and social suppression of speech.
That's not the operative distinction most of us are working with, nor do I think there's much demand for an alternative theory of the case. The conventional distinction, which is more or less a distinction between positive and negative rights, is working quite nicely, sufficiently explains the motivation for the rule, and isn't in search of improvement.
I think you more or less wrote, "I don't really like the idea of Free Speech, but I've been told my whole life that it's important, so I'm looking for a way to resolve this dissonance."
The reason I'm not in search of better arguments is that I don't have any dissonance to resolve. (I realize that sounds snarky but I don't actually mean it to be flippant. That's genuinely what it looks like to me. No snark intended!)
