 Many of the claims made above, both on behalf of bans and in opposition, raise theoretical and empirical issues whose proper examination spans many articles and books. Suffice to say that the debate over bans is a highly contested one, and each position rests on an understanding of such issues as the value of free expression, the harm of hate speech, the likely effects a ban might have in a particular context, and so on. For instance, one who believes that free expression is valuable in part because of its role in democratic decision-making may maintain that specifically political speech deserves increased protections, and that some of what others regard as hate speech might fall into this category, escaping regulation. Alternatively, one may view the immunity for political speech as perhaps a red herring. On the speech act theoretic framework outlined above, some forms of racist hate speech are functionally identical to a ‘Whites Only’ sign hanging in a public restaurant (McGowan 2012; McGowan and Maitra 2009). The latter expresses a political opinion in the same way as the former expression does, but it is also regarded as unlawful racially discriminatory. The same considerations—legal sanction—might therefore apply to the verbal utterance as the written sign, and the appeal to the political content of the message is irrelevant.