I don't have time for a carefully crafted essay but I want to rebut your main arguments:

1. I have been on many program committees. Program committee members make good faith efforts to stay blind, and to stay neutral when blindness fails. Personal feelings *absolutely* guide selection decisions, for example personal feelings about whether certain scientific work is interesting or useful. This is why we have program committees. I suspect that most people who think PCs are or should be objective have never served on one.

2. As can be seen in my original post, I qualified this paragraph with "taken literally" which makes it absolutely true. I can submit any gibberish I want to a conference. If it is gibberish it will be rejected, but nothing stops me from submitting. I did not say there were no consequences to the submission. But this is not literal prior restraint.

In any case, I raised this literal interpretation in order to reject it and consider broader interpretations in the following paragraphs; I don't know why you bothered disputing an argument that I rejected.

3. Free speech is not a binary concept. Or if it is, then free speech does not currently exist anywhere on earth. As one can see from the Wikipedia article on free speech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech , " common limitations or boundaries to freedom of speech relate to libel, slander, obscenity, pornography, sedition, incitement, fighting words, classified information, copyright violation, trade secrets, food labeling, non-disclosure agreements, the right to privacy, dignity, the right to be forgotten, public security, and perjury. Justifications for such include the harm principle, proposed by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty, which suggests that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others." And my thinking it pretty close to Mill's: if someone's speech can harm others, there may be reasons to curtail it. We saw a pretty powerful example of that this week, and I absolutely support attacking Trump's via, for example, impeachment, on the grounds of his personal view that it's ok to use lies (speech) to encourage violence against our government.