Americans come from a country where, in living memory, having a different colour skin removed whole areas of your legal rights. Interracial marriage was banned in several states until roughly the time of the moon landings. This is why Americans are rather touchy about people making light of racism.
There is a middle ground between "sending people to camps for a wrong joke" and "no one should be held accountable for any of their actions if they claim they are jokes"
There is no yet identified metaphysical difference between speech and other actions, and freedom of expression laws frequently also protect non-speech actions such as burning flags.
It's still a dangerous territory. Do you remember when Adria Richards overheard two guys talking about dongles and forking at a conference, assumed it was offensive/sexual and got them fired, before we learned that... they were talking about dongles and forking?
People shouldn't use jokes as a cover for racism, sexism, etc. We know people do this. We should do things to stop it. No one is saying you can't make whatever jokes you like in private with people you know won't be offended, but they are saying that those jokes can be harmful to people they want to have in their community, and that you can't say them in that community. It's their right to do so.
People also shouldn't try to get others fired over things like people talking about dongles and forking, assuming they're actually talking about dongles and forking. If someone approaches you and makes a joke about how they want to fork you with their dongle, well, it's pretty obvious what they mean. If you overhear someone talking and hear the words fork and dongle, well, it's not so obvious and we probably shouldn't get them fired.
That being said, it sounds like the joke was at least in part actually a sexually charged joke about a "big dongle" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681 - though the forking seems to have not been intended to be sexually charged. This is perhaps another reason that people should consider their words - if you just made a joke about a "big dongle" and then immediately say "I'd fork his repo," there's a chance it's going to be interpreted in a sexual manner because of the context.
Making a joke about "big dongles" in public is probably not something you should do. Someone being offended doesn't automatically mean they're right, but it's also not a high bar to not make dick jokes around thousands of other people that you don't know and don't know how they'll take it.
So on the one hand, we have a massive systematic problem across virtually all online platforms. This problem involves (at least) thousands of new examples every day and so far has proved nearly impossible to control. And next to that we have a different problem based largely on idiosyncratic examples, and extrapolations from those idiosyncratic examples to hypothetical worst case scenarios.
I find this way of engaging with the problem to be profoundly misguided in two ways. One, it's a failure to correctly evaluate the relative scale of the two problems, and to consistently think and speak clearly about them in terms that reflect their relative scale.
And secondly, it mistakenly sets up the two problems as being in a relationship of interference with one another, such that talking about one is used to mean we should stop talking about the other. Instead of saying "this statement that racism is bad and sexual harassment is bad is a statement I do not support" it would be more helpful say "yes, that is a problem, I agree, we need to solve it. And meanwhile here's this other thing, but don't let this other thing detract from the importance of the first problem or imply we don't need to actively work on the first problem."
