Ongoing speech is still speech, but harassment is an action that does not rely only on speech. Following somebody around is not “speech” per se, but it could damn well be harassment.

You just dodged the question, there. Once again: how is calling someone a slur once speech, but calling them a slur repeatedly not speech? After all, your whole premise here is that we would have to outlaw words to legislate hate speech, so it follows that we’d have to outlaw words to legislate verbal harassment, because there’s no such thing as nuance.

Yes, to prove a point: What you think is just an insult could become verbal abuse if you repeat it enough to the target. If someone wants to outlaw verbal abuse, they must define it incredibly narrowly, or else insults—even benign and seemingly harmless insults—would be outlawed.

Benign and seemingly harmless insults? That seems like such an odd phrase. Anyways, I don’t disagree that it would have to be defined narrowly; I only disagree with how narrowly you are attempting to define it! You seem to believe our legal system can’t handle nuance. For the most part, it can, though we mostly hear about the times when it fails to do so, since those are the newsworthy moments.

The Supreme Court of the United States has never clearly and specifically defined what it considers “hate speech”—not even for the purpose of making such speech illegal. Courts can, will, and already do get it wrong. Do not place all of your faith in them.

The Supreme Court is not the only way precedent is made, courts getting something wrong is part of the process and is useful for defining the boundaries of our laws, you’ve completely ignored the concept of trial-by-jury in your response here, and the whole point of appeals and higher courts is that we don’t place all our faith in one court.

If I call myself “queer”—a well-known anti-LGBT slur—after the word has been declared “hate speech”, which one of those punishments should I receive?

You’re back to "hate speech is words" here.

Except that is what hate speech legislation would be about.

Nope.

Hate speech legislation is not about making words illegal. Hate speech legislation is about making statements, in certain contexts, for certain apparent purposes, illegal. You yourself admit that the US makes exception for words likely to cause imminent violence – and yet you’re claiming here that we can’t have that level of nuance in our legal system, that we have to outlaw words because we can’t look at the context around them and determine whether those words are hateful in that context. Do we, or do we not, have enough nuance to examine a circumstance and determine the intent of the words used?

Lots of people in the LGBT population self-identify with that word, even though it has long been used as a slur against LGBT people. If we say “queer” is hate speech based on that history, and two queer people use the word in the presence of a third person, can the third person have the other two arrested for violation of hate speech laws? They did, after all, use hate speech in the presence of a third party who was uncomfortable with it, and I would want to know if their self-identifying as queer is possibly inciting hatred.

This is a strawman. For starters, "queer" probably wouldn’t qualify as hate words even if we were outlawing words at this point; you’re probably aiming more for words like, beg pardon, "fag."

Regarding your question: did the third person inform them that he is uncomfortable with that word, and ask them to stop using it? Did they dismiss him and continue using it, deliberately, in his presence, to make him uncomfortable? Does the third person consider that a slur against himself, and if so, did he inform them that he does? In short, was it actually an intentional attempt to harass him?

And in both hypotheticals above, assuming the offending parties can be arrested for violating hate speech laws, how badly should they be punished based on the words used and the contexts in which those words were used?

Well, for starters, in both those cases, it probably wouldn’t be hate speech, as it’s too isolated; there could potentially be civil hate-based harassment suits, but no, I doubt they would be arrested. In contrast, there may have been some arrests in Charlottesville for hate speech, for certain things they were screaming in unison in a public demonstration- things like "Black lives splatter," "Gas the k[word], race war now," and the like.

Banning the anti-gay speech of the Westboro Baptist Church, the hoods worn by the Klan, or the swastika symbols used by Nazis does not ban the underlying hatred that those things represent. You can take a slur out of a bigot’s vocabulary, but you cannot take the bigotry with it.

I find it interesting that you’re saying this here, but elsewhere you’re defending the removal of nazis from social media to protect their victims from them. You cannot remove the bigotry, no; but you can stifle its spread, prevent its exercise, and protect those vulnerable to it, both victims and potential recruits.

[Please note, none of this is to say that I personally support hate speech legislation; I am on the fence about the subject still, and I definitely understand the possible issues with handing that much power to the government to persecute people for speech. Mostly, this is devil’s advocacy because I disagree with your particular arguments, not advocacy for legislation directly :p]