The most half-baked thing about the anti-transgender Christian couple isn’t their approach to gender

We live in a society with a tendency towards liberal intolerance, in which the fury of the mob turns on anyone who dares hold a different belief to the mainstream particularly if they are from an unpopular group such as conservative Christians. But we also live in a society where some people who hold non-mainstream beliefs don’t feel they really have to think them through.

Last week, I wrote about the difference between directing scorn at Jacob Rees-Mogg for holding unpopular beliefs which he is happy to justify, and directing scorn at those who hold unpopular beliefs which they aren’t prepared to debate in public, possibly because those beliefs are in fact half-baked. A truly liberal society that is secure in its liberalism should find the half-baked argument far more distasteful than the unpopular argument which has been thought through. Insecure liberals are the ones who do not have enough confidence in their own arguments that they know they can prove why the person they are arguing with is wrong.