It results in a forum where bigots can spew their hatred freely without ever being confronted, because their hatred is "opinion" (so long as it's not outright call to murders or call people inferior and just say that they believe this or that group is responsible for this or that ill, or that this or that group is made of sinners, or that this or that group shouldn't have certain rights) while confronting them is "flaming". In a similar vein, the idea that it's fine to bash an entire group, but not a specific individual, which is an entirely arbitrary limit (as groups are made of people ; if you say a group is bad you say the individuals within are bad).
The conclusion you make does not follow from the logic/evidence. Applying rules equally does not mean allowing undesirable behavior. It means that your rules are inconsistent with how a given person wants that forum to operate.
You can, for example, make explicit rules against topics that target belief systems if those types of posts bother you as opposed to you simply dismissing them as drivel. It is also possible to argue rationally against bigots without insulting them or breaking any forum rules, insofar as you can present rational arguments to anything (even if the act of doing so to a wall, for example, isn't rational). You can (and I would) make the case that doing so is a waste of time, but I would also argue that confronting them in any other capacity is at least an equal waste of time at that point. Many forums have rules against derailing threads/going off-topic outside of off-topic subforums, and it's hard for people to spew hate in unrelated threads without going off-topic.
What is not okay is to create a situation whereby you define explicit rules, and then only enforce them against people you don't like. Regardless of whether the reason you don't like them is valid in your mind, that is dishonest practice. If a particular behavior is so bad that it merits censorship, the honest approach is to put it in the rules and prevent people from doing it.
Similarly bad is to create vague nonsense like "no trolling" and then simply allow moderators sole discretion as to what constitutes "trolling", such that any post that people disagree with, even if it presents supporting evidence and is 100% on topic, can be defined as "trolling" if it so pleases the moderator, with appeals ignored outright. When you get dinged for repeating what a developer/moderator said (in writing, on the same forum) in a thread about the topic in question in order to explain your reasoning, you have flagrant dishonesty and one-sided moderation. Most sites have at least some language against this though, and it's really variant on whether it gets abused to oust people with critical opinions or if it's truly reserved for overt efforts to anger people.
Absent any moderation at all, most of the time it's just ad-hominem all over the place with frequent appeals to authority and a ton of one-liners thrown in to completely drown out anything resembling someone making an argument or even a useful observation. Take the ESPM comments section during the Sandusky story...lots of finger pointing and jokes in bad taste, not a whole lot about what was actually done by people involved and what theoretically should have been done. There was basically nothing worth reading in those comments and not a great deal to say to people making them. Political news stories are similar in my experience, though if it's not a huge story you might not get spammed out of sight.
Moderation here is one of the site's strongest aspects. I didn't realize that in detail at first because it was the first time I frequented a single forum to this extent, so it took until I had 10-20k posts across other boards to see the scope of differences one might encounter.
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