"Here, here!" to your thoughtful response to what sounds like a nasty situation. You've hit just the right mix of humility and sticking to your guns. However, I have a suspicion about the people who so criticized your original tweet. Like you said, they may not be bigots, but it's also possible that they don't want to be *called* bigots because they haven't accepted that that's what they are. It seems like there was a lot of confusion among this crowd about hate speech v. free speech. They're not the same thing, and if your critics realized this, I wonder how many of them would look back and agree that they *were* being bigots after all.