Timothy Flanders has been posting at OnePeterFive for some time now, and among his themes there is Marian Devotion. Last August he posted "Why Heretics Hate Mary"; this past week, "With Humility, Women Uplift Themselves and Sanctify Men".
I wish to preface this my response: I do not argue (here) any point of Catholicism, right or wrong. I am here to flag comments by one specific Catholic author, Timothy Flanders. And not even because Flanders is particularly wrong. To disclose mine own leanings: I think Catholic dogma is philosophically valid, and I endorse (with my whole heart) the statement of "With Humility..."'s title. On the debit side I find Flanders' rhetoric, question-begging and offensive. I do not hate Mary; but as I read Flanders, I admit to difficulty in loving him, as I am called to do. Whenever I experience cognitive dissonance on this scale I feel obliged to work it out on pixels.
Flanders speaks for a strand in Christian piety, going back to such works as Paul and Thecla. This strand praises women who support the proper form of Christianity. What these women are praised for, if I may dangle the participle, may vary - it so varies for Flanders. Sometimes woman is praised for the act of giving birth. Sometimes it is for virginity. It is usual that virginity and motherhood are mutually incompatible; the Gospels' Mary is an exception.
Christianity's most ancient baptismal ritual demands the equal dignity of man and woman before G-d. This creed is so ancient our earliest converso - Saint Paul - cited it, usually to support his own thought, and sometimes despite it. Most religions of Paul's day had likewise found space for femininity. Still, nature tells us we are each created different. We are most different when a woman is heavily with child or protecting her children - this woman is, then, helpless alone. Any community must protect the virtue of its virgins (especially female) and the safety of its recent mothers.
The theological Christian creed doesn't talk about "no slave no free" and so on. It talks about the nature of God and about how God relates to Creation. It happens the metaphor it chooses for Divine Dyotheletism is that of the father / son relationship. This creed has one point where a woman shows up: the nonmetaphorical Virgin Mary. In Catholic churches we bow down at that point of the recitation. Nonetheless Mary's name is as beside the point as is Pilate's; these names merely tie the theological plane to a point in history. (Again, this post isn't arguing why 4 BC would have been a better year for the Incarnation than, oh, AG 1.) It is outside this creed where Christendom must work out the problem[atic]s of sex and of sexual dimorphism.
This burden, Christians have placed upon Mary to bear.
That Mary was a virgin when she bore Jesus is as ancient as Paul's baptismal creed. Paul knew that Jesus was "born of woman" and that Jesus is eternal Lord; this requires an Incarnation, but Paul glossed over its mechanic. Mark proposed a Christ walking Earth as YHWH El walked Eden, also skipping Christ's early years. Luke harmonised Mark and Paul (at least), from which (s)he ventured a literal Incarnation. Matthew treated King Jesus as fils-Joseph. John... well, he's John; and I know not what the Egerton Gospel floated on the topic.
Among the unbelievers the "mythicists" say that Christians concocted a Christ born-of-woman; here, a human father would be redundant and so mythicism forces a Virgin Birth along pagan lines. Mere revisionists like Bart Ehrman say that Matthew was correct, and composed his (belated) Gospel to defend Jeshu' Bar-Joseph against both those Jewish slanders which became the "Bar Pantera" meme and the Incarnation.
Since its second century at least, Christianity has agreed to an effective mythicism here. The Christian would simply assert that the myth is true, that it all happened. Justin Martyr's harmony tradition sided with Luke on the Virgin Birth. Marcion's Gospel was Luke.
This post can't assume that, if we hope to keep working from philosophical first principles. We have instead to ask if this myth works toward the Good: for humankind here, and for the best part of the Lovecraftian multiverse outside. John Zmirak took a similar approach in his The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. I must here disclose I find Zmirak's work to be more approachable than is Flanders'.
On Christmas Eve 2016 - before I became Catholic - I raised some problems against Marian Devotion. I worried that taking her as example would create a Girardian memetic crisis in a Christian community. It would raise bastardy over children born to a marital union. Historically, Marian Devotion has led to a different problem: virginity sanctified for its own sake. And this is what I see in Flanders' posts.
For that reason and for others (as one more indirect example, I mooted in 2016 that theotokos over-divinises Jesus, leading to Monotheletism) I do not see Mary as "Destroyer of Heresies". Assuming that a heresy is an incorrect belief, leading away from The Good: Mary has too-often been made the mother of heresies.
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