‘Sex’ is no consolation for the loss of free speech, and the capacity to test & discover the Truth with each other
by Gavin Ashenden:
[…] Something has happened in the last 30 years or so that makes it increasingly difficult to separate emotional reactions from ideas, and emotional reactions from our assessment of other peoples’ humanity or lack of it.
It seemed almost to start with Princess Diana’s death. The community was suddenly divided into two groups- so emotionally charged as to be deaf to one another. It’s happened a lot since, most obviously with Brexit. We find we can’t easily talk to one another across the Brexit minefield and retain either our respect or our affection for the people on the other side.
The gay marriage issue has had the same effect. And this is the personal bit. I was on the ‘other side’ of the debate for a long time. I don’t need to explain why. It may be enough just to say I enjoyed the company of my gay friends very much, and felt very defensive for them.
The change in our social conversation that has happened in my adult life time has just been astonishing; for the next step in the culture wars, transgenderism, was almost weird. Never could I have begun to imagine that the qualification for speaking in a university, or holding down certain types of job, would become whether or not you believed that someone born a man, who mentally preferred to be seen as being a woman, had to be called a woman, or offered made up personal pronouns of their own preference. I couldn’t have conceived that even Germaine Greer or Peter Tatchell, paragons of right-on, compassionate liberalism, would fail the test and have their voices silenced.
And ultimately, that’s what it seems to me to be all about. A strange, creeping movement of emotionally driven but ideological censorship, centred on sex, that is closing down free speech.
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