Talk politics.

Yeah, Barbara's statement is a bit scary.

The belief that one has a "right" to not be offended requires one to also believe in the right to force one's ideology on another.

I don't think this follows. Please explain how it does.

Further, even if it did follow, it would also have to follow that the belief in a "right to offend others" must also be paired with a "right to force one's ideology on another." A similar imposition of values occurs, on this view, when a person is expected to keep silent, whether that silence is out of respect for other people's sensitivities or it's a silence subjected to the freely-dispensed offensive speech of others.

It is, by nature, anathema to the traditional interpretation of the 1st Amendment and the whole idea of freedom of speech / religion in general.

I don't think so, but we have to be clear about what we're talking about.

I would distinguish between speech that is incidentally offensive to some of its hearers and speech whose purpose is to offend others. I think it's probably right to say that incidentally offensive speech generally falls within what we normally think of as the "core" of the First Amendment's protection. That kind of speech, after all, arguably could include just about anything.

But intentionally offensive speech is something different. It is speech designed to harm, and usually it's designed to harm certain people. It's not "anathema" to the "traditional interpretation" (which one?) of the First Amendment to suggest that people might have a right not to be subjected to intentionally harmful speech, any more than it is "anathema" to the Second Amendment to suggest that I have the right not to be subjected to the reckless misuse of a firearm. Think about it this way: if the First Amendment were crafted just to protect intentionally offensive speech, how much sense would it make, as a key prop for our democracy? How much of its purpose would be undermined by crafting it that way?

That's not to say - and I know that saying this will prove futile - that I think the First Amendment should be understood to stand for a particular legal principle where certain kinds of laws banning offensive speech are okay. On this point, we should take care to distinguish between the First Amendment as a way of referring to certain moral or philosophical rights we can discuss in the abstract and as a legal mechanism by which those rights are protected. The moral strength of the First Amendment may be consistent with a view on our rights, but that would not compel us to take a corresponding view as to the First Amendment's actual, legal reach - that's a separate kind of question.

Furthermore, there seems to be a growing trend in American politics to use conspicuous displays of outrage and offense as a form of political signalling raising the obvious question of, how does one avoid offending someone who is actively looking for something to be offended about?

You're being exceedingly vague here, so I don't know whose actions I'm supposed to be defending or attacking. But I will say it is a bit of a bad excuse to cite the First Amendment as an reason not to engage in decent, civil behavior with one another.

There ought to be a law that makes it a punishable crime for comedians to not be funny. After all, humour, like offence, is an objective quality that we all understand and can apply.

This reminds me of anti-blasphemy laws. I find it ironic that deities need to have humans around to enforce injunctions against insulting them. This makes the advocates of blasphemy laws somewhat blasphemous. After all, they make it seem that their deities are impotent.

Johan Galtung has some interesting observations on blasphemy in this interview: