I've always been wary about people suppressing the truth and using power to do it. But I've been taken by surprise about how it has happened in the last 15 years or so, and how quickly.

It took shape with the equivalent of a three card trick lifted from psychobabble, -using phobias. There are of course some very real phobias. Arachnophobia the fear of spiders is a well known established condition. But this idea of 'fear' has been planted in places it doesn't belong, and used in ways when it no longer tells the truth about things.

Germaine Greer is one of the gutsiest, least fearful people in the public forum. But she has been prevented from giving a lecture at Cardiff University because she has been accused of being 'transphobic'. A few years ago she remarked that anyone born without a vagina wasn't actually a woman. I can't imagine Germaine Greer being afraid of anything. She just happens to have a view about what in her estimation, encapsulates an essential aspect of womanhood. But she has been accused and convicted of 'transphobia' - and silenced (Not that the lecture had anything to do with sex changes.)

There are two other phobias that are rooted in recent legislation that have much more serious effects. Homophobia and islamophobia. In the way we use words, phobia has moved unconsciously from meaning fear, to denoting hatred in peoples' minds. The difficulty this makes for us is that there are serious and complex things to be understood and discussed both about sexual identity or preference, and about the history and practice of Islam. Until recently, we could get closer to the truth by talking about these things and comparing arguments, analyses and discoveries. That was one of the reasons that our whole culture treasured free speech, and was willing to pay the price of offending people who didn't share each others' views, as a way of getting to the truth about things.

The relation between truth and untruth is a simple one. You compare truth with untruth and the difference between the two emerges sooner or later; but emerge it does. You do have to test one against the other, and you can't do that if you suppress free speech, as we are doing.

This toxic combination of pseudo therapeutic language and thought crime has produced a culture where it has become more of a priority to protect people from being offended, than to try to tell the truth.

We have started to criminalize other people whom we deem to have phobias, - on the ground that fear leads to hatred, and hatred requires punishing and then silencing. But silencing means no free speech; no free speech means no access to the truth.

In the last 15 years, the option of finding, discussing and telling the truth has begun to be taken away from us. We used to be able speak 'truth to power'. Not any more.

Like Orwell, I don't believe in equality. What I believe in is eradicating injustice. To disbelieve in equality has become the new blasphemy of course that offends the cultural Marxism we are being suffocated by. But equality works for numbers; it's not so good with values. Make it happen in one place and you create inequality somewhere else.

You can try to tackle injustice with the law, and you should. But that's a different enterprise. I don't like hatred or fear in people. But I know that you can't use the law to cure them. (God does a much better job than the law!) Use, or abuse the law to do this and you sacrifice free speech; without it, what are you going to use to challenge the abuses of power that always follow it? I don't like people being offensive. But I dislike even more being forced to live someone else's lie.

Jesus (who claimed to be the Truth) claimed that 'truth will set you free'. As you might expect the opposite is true too. Trade in free speech, which tests the truth, for the illusions of equality and the suppression of so-called phobias, and you won't free to speak or act for long. Just ask Germaine Greer.

The Rev. Canon Dr. Gavin Ashenden is Vicar of St Martin de Gouray in Jersey, the Channel Islands (just off the French Normandy coast). Trained at Oak Hill Theological College he became Senior Lecturer in the Psychology of Religion at Sussex University. He is a Chaplain to the Queen and Canon Theologian at Chichester Cathedral. As a broadcaster he has hosted a BBC Religion and Ethics show for 4 years (2008-2012) which had 100,000 listeners across the South East of England, and presented the BBC podcast on Religion and Ethics. He is the author of a number of books and essays on the Oxford Inklings.