“Unbelieving women either compete for the attention of men through outlandish messages that communicate some variation of ‘easy lay,’ or in the grip of resentment they give up the endeavor entirely, which is how we get lumberjack dykes. The former is an avid reader of Cosmopolitan and thinks she knows 15K ways to please a man in bed. The latter is just plain surly about the fact that there even are any men.” Douglas Wilson

Pastor Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, Moscow, hails himself an apologist for the Christian faith. He teaches logic and apologetics. He has co-authored a couple of textbooks on logic. He regularly points out the fallacies of his opponents as he debates them. And in our epigraph he frames a textbook example of the fallacy of the false dilemma.

A false dilemma occurs when the speaker or writer offers limited choices for a given scenario despite the existence of multiple alternatives. False dilemmas are also called “the either/or fallacy,” because they’re usually predicated on the words either/or — “It’s either this or that.” Thus Mr. Wilson: “Unbelieving women either compete . . . or . . . give up . . .”

Mr. Wilson’s false dilemma is easily refuted. For example, some unbelieving women feel called to singleness. My mother is an unbeliever and she neither parades herself for free sex nor swings an axe. Still others have left the church after their pastor threw them under the bus, yet they still kept their heterosexuality and their virtue.

It’s also easy to respond to false dilemmas in kind. For example, one could appeal to the most common false dilemma, “He’s either crazy or incompetent.” Or one could say, “Mr. Wilson is either trying to change the subject from the child molesters he protected or he’s lashing out at women because they expressed the most anger at him for protecting child molesters.”

But perhaps it’s wisest to simply take him at his word. After all, he either means it or he doesn’t.