A house divided cannot stand, said Christ. So it should come as no surprise that the left is beginning to devour itself. Witness the travails of former philosophy professor Kathleen Stock. She is no conservative, but rather an avowed ‘liberal’, a feminist in a lesbian relationship. But she fell foul of the ‘T’ of the LGBTQ, and the transgenderites know no tolerance. Her sin was in claiming that those who held that there was no real difference between men and women – and no such objective and fixed thing as ‘sex’ – was degrading and harmful to women. This implied that there was a fixed reality such as a ‘woman’.
But there is no W in the totemic acronym, and the T’s were not standing for this. Their terrorist tactics are a sure sign they are not settled in their own ‘truth’. Unable to persuade by convincing argument, they resort to Aristotle’s logical fallacy of ad baculum – to the rod – beating those who disagree into submission.
This method may have some short term, individual ‘victories’: Dr. Stockland is gone from Sussex university and, apparently, from teaching altogether. But this will prove futile in the long run. Again, to paraphrase Our Saviour, those who mete out the rod, will get the rod meted out in return, even if it be the rod of the Lord’s mouth, more severe and just than any human version. (cf., Is 11:4)
As Pope Benedict exhorts in his 2006 Regensburg address, it is truth itself – at least, the seeking thereof – that must be basis for dialogue, even disagreement. The only other recourse is violence. We may live in hope that only the truth, and nothing but, will prevail, in the end.