Once again, Coggins seeks to reduce everything he reads to his simplistic, binary view of the universe. Replacing light and darkness, good and evil, and the other popular polar opposites of the past, is Coggins' "conservative and liberal", under which he has marshalled all other binary pair.
Observe. Although Trevor will never admit it (because to do so would place his real beliefs in the arena of ideas where they would be subject to the scathing disinfectant of light), this is a version of Postmodernism, which is the most radical and thorough repudiation of both the intellect and the moral imagination the western Left has yet constructed. Trevor is afraid of opposites and binary pairs because he is deathly afraid of being placed on one side or the other of them. To do so, to even accept indirectly, the premises that such opposites or dualisms exist, is to drive a stake through the very heart of the liberal's core assumption: that all values, all morality, and all choices are relative and arbitrary, and that the sovereign self can construct his own values and moralities as it goes along.
This is
utterly terrifying to the liberal because it implies that he, yes he, the sovereign, liberal, liberated autonomous self is open to moral and value judgment. His behavior, his ideas, and his values can be called into question by a
higher value system and potentially condemned as...yes...wrong, destructive, and even...
evil. There can really be such a thing as right and wrong, higher and lower, good ideas and bad ideas, and good and evil. The leftist wants to transcend values because he seeks to exempt himself from the consequences of his own.
He can no longer pretend to be confused by the moral, ethical, political, or philosophical questions put before him in this life. He can no longer
opt out of the great moral questions of the day, such as homosexual marriage, by simply declaring that no judgments can be passed and that therefore the only real evil is...the passing of judgment. He can no longer pretend to be moral by posing as an arbiter of all relative morality.
Furthermore, he is transparently trying to change the topic from his mind reading of Quinn to more of his political fiddle-faddle. Coggins pretends to know what motivated Quinn, drawing a conclusion that cuts against everything Quinn has ever said about his own motivations. Something tells me that Coggins is a crappy mindreader. Certainly this attempt has failed.
All I'm saying is that most of Quinn's work is transparently tendentious, which is not arguable. Quinn has never, to my knowledge, taken a strictly dispassionate position on anything he's ever written about in a mass market non-fiction book. His agenda is social and doctrinal change within the Church and he has never written a book on Mormon issues or history that does not overtly exude this overarching theme.