The first sentence really sets the tone: "At O'Reilly, we assume that most people are intelligent and well-intended, and we're not inclined to tell people what to do"
I don't know that free speech is granted to insure that oppression can be defeated or overcome by language, but that is a different discussion.
Free speech, as defined by numerous Supreme Court decisions, protects speech that expresses ideas, however distasteful, but does not tolerate advocating of action that will cause harm, nor statements whose sole purpose is to invoke an altercation--"fighting words".
The clear distinction from Oliver Wendell Holmes is that you can yell, "Fire!", but not in a crowded theatre. Free speech is not without limits.
So you can legally say that someone is ugly, but you cannot advocate assaults on people that you perceive as ugly.
I was surprised that the code of conduct was all about what you shouldn't do, instead of what was expected of the attendees.
Telling adults, "Be careful in the words that you choose." does give the code the Code a patina of Political Correctness. I was half expecting the next paragraph to warn me to look both ways before crossing the street.
The Code has a very broad definition of harassment that makes no distinction between a one time comment and a pattern of repetitive behaviour intended to intimidate or cause harm.
I see that "following" is one of the actions that defines harassment. How does that differ from stalking? I assume they are not referring to Twitter.
From what I understand, the code was approved by the Board of Directors of the PSF, and not the PSF as a whole. Please, correct me if I am wrong. This is ironic since one of the Board members was walking around the conference last year with a damaged stuffed python toy asking, "Would you like to see my one eyed snake?"
This was said to one of my female colleagues. I asked her if she would like me to say something and she replied, "No, it is just creepy, but I'm an adult."
The Board's aspiration to create a welcoming environment is laudable and this spirit is very much a part of the Python community. I don't think that the Code, as worded, helps accomplish this. It is overly broad and loosely defined. The result is that it sounds like an attempt to infantilize the attendees and proscribe behaviour that may be part of vigorous exchanges of points of view.
I am sure that this is not what the Board intended, but you would wish for a more articulate expression from a group of engineers who would not tolerate this sense of generality in their code.