I do note that it would probably be perceived differently by someone who was aware of its truth (this person would certainly be hurt by the reminder of the bad thing), than by someone who was not (i.e. a religious person).

Maybe, although I strongly suspect religious people alieve that their relatives are gone (otherwise, as others have noted, a funeral would be more like a going-away party).

This one is interesting. A tangential thought: have there been studies to determine the power of stereotype threat to affect people who are aware of stereotype threat?

Good question. Wikipedia turns up this link, which would seem to say "Yes." So happily, the corrective for this contextually harmful empirical statement is a contextually helpful empirical statement.

...one solution I would vehemently oppose would be to forbid such statements from being made at all.

Oh yes, certainly. Refusing to notice ingroup/outgroup differences is just the opposite failure mode.

There's something wrong with your assessment (of the revealing clothing --> sexual assault case) here and I can't quite put my finger on it. Intuitively it feels like the category of "blame" is being abused, but I have to think more about this one.

I am still philosophically confused about this issue, although I have been thinking about it for a while. You are probably objecting to the fact that ex hypothesi, less revealing clothing leads to fewer sexual assaults, so why wouldn't we follow that advice - yes? As I say, I don't have a full account of that. All I wanted to draw attention to is the ethical questionable-ness of making such a statement without any acknowledgement that one is asking potential victims to change their (blameless) behaviour in order to avoid (blameworthy) assault from others. Compounding the issue is the suspicion that statements like this ALSO tend to be a form of whitewashed slut-shaming.

The problem here, I think, is that some people use "X is going to happen" with the additional meaning of "X should happen", often without realizing it; in other words they have the unconscious belief that what does happen is what should happen. Such people often have substantial difficulty even understanding replies like "Yes, X will happen, but it's not right for X to happen"; they perceive such replies as incoherent.

Yes, in my experience this is very common in muggle society.

If I think X will happen (or not happen), it's important (imo) that I have the ability and right to make that empirical prediction, unimpeded by social norms against offense. If people who are afflicted with status quo bias, or other failures of reasoning, fail to distinguish between "is" and "ought" and in consequence take my prediction to have some sort of normative content — well, it may be flippant to say "that's their problem", but the situation definitely falls into the "audience is insufficiently intelligent/sane" category. Saying "this statement is offensive" in such a case is not only wrong, it's detrimental to open discourse.

Right. The rubric that I try to use in such situations is essentially a consequentialist one. Roughly speaking, the idea is that you should try to predict how your statements might be misinterpreted by a (possibly silly) audience, and if the expected harm of the misinterpretation is significant as compared to the potential benefit of your statement, then reformulate/be silent/narrow your audience/educate your audience about why they shouldn't misinterpret you. I sympathize, believe me! It's incredibly annoying to be read uncharitably. But if you know how to prevent an uncharitable/harmful reading, and don't as a matter of principle because the audience should know better... I think the LW term for that would be "living in the should-universe."

Agreed. I just think that branding certain sorts of statements as "offensive" is entirely the wrong way to go about treating this issue with the care it deserves, because of the detrimental effects that approach has on free discourse.

As it happens, I broadly agree about the term "offensive," which is an incredibly censorious and abuse-prone word. I think we should try to give better fault assessments than that - and happily, on LW most people usually do.