It is tempting to reply to the Georgetown nonsense by making a more or less univocal connection between the public humiliation and penitential obeisance of the enemies of the people and the carefully-scripted confessions of the victims of Stalin’s show trials. And the very title ‘Free Speech and Expression Committee’ is so rhetorically close to the ‘Committee of Public Safety’ that some reference to the likeness is irresistible. But to keep our own moral compass we need to make such comparisons with a certain irony. After all, I assume that nobody at Georgetown is going to be shot in an underground cell or enjoy the favor of Mme. Guillotine. That the hard left lacks irony is perhaps one of its most egregious—and most dangerous—traits. The social and political cost of this simplistic linguistic world is likely to be very high indeed. If our moral vocabulary allows for no distinction in degrees of moral outrage, then a tasteless cartoon becomes as bad as genocide—or, to make the problem more obvious, genocide becomes no worse than a tasteless cartoon. In such a world, intelligent moral discourse and discussion are practically dead. It is a shame that it is the privileged moralizers in the universities who appear to be in the vanguard of killing it.

(source: Georgetown and the Death of Moral Discourse | Carl R. Trueman | First Things)

I had planned to write a long post reflecting on this, but Dan’s and Greg’s recent think pieces, and the discussion spiralling around them, seem to tell me that events have overtaken that long-ago intention.  But do read the article.