Wendy Kaminer:

How did we get here? How did a verbal defense of free speech become tantamount to a hate crime and offensive words become the equivalent of physical assaults?

You can credit — or blame — progressives for this enthusiastic embrace of censorship. It reflects, in part, the influence of three popular movements dating back decades: the feminist anti-porn crusades, the pop-psychology recovery movement and the emergence of multiculturalism on college campuses.

Interesting. I read her book Sleeping With Extraterrestrials over a decade ago, but hadn’t seen her around since. I had no idea her reasonableness had transformed her into a quasi-reactionary, gender-traitor enemy of all that is good and holy. Glad to see it.

Our progressives strike me largely as the kind of people who will endlessly congratulate themselves for having successfully rebelled against the uptight, repressed mores of the Victorian age while failing to consider that not only were the Victorians proud of their enlightened, sophisticated attitudes, but that in another couple centuries, it’s just as likely that people will be looking back with astonished laughter at our own hypocritical taboos and uptight mores. As always, history stops right here where we happen to be standing, conveniently enough. We are the punctuation mark following the final word on enlightened values. I know, right? What are the odds? Why, it almost seems too good to be true.