I am not terribly moved by the legal liability argument. I will gladly endure the persecution of a hostile state for standing up for what I believe is right.
I am, however, moved by the moral argument.
I look at it similar to the porn issue on Nostr. I run my own relay, and I am under no illusions that filtering porn from my relay is going to make much impact on Nostr as a whole at all. However, I can have a clear conscience knowing that I am not contributing to it with my relay.
Same with filters on my node. It's not going to have a lot of impact on keeping non-monetary transactions, especially those containing data I find to be immoral, out of the blockchain, but I will know that my node is not contributing to the problem, and since I am creating block templates with my node's mempool, I know that if I ever found a block, it would not be contributing to the issue.
So I see a lot of reason to have the option to filter your mempool if you want to do so as a node runner, and that taking that option away is not the route we should be going. Not so node runners can bend to the will of any state, but so they can be faithful to what they believe is right. Particularly since doing so in this context in no way imposes their view of what is right on anyone else. They are deciding it only for their own individual node.
