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A Strawman Fallacy
Publication date: 2007-11-18

An Example of the Strawman Fallacy Argument and of How to Deal with It.

We received a comment to our article “British Children to be Sodomized at School at Taxpayers Expense — Why?

How can you be relied upon for “truth, honesty, and justice” when you misrepresent the facts at issue to suit your own agenda? The Parliamentary vote in no way included or advocated the sodomization of any child or student, at school or anywhere else; and certainly not at public or taxpayer expense.

The fact that you insist on depicting the vote in such terms clearly illustrates your duplicity and disregard for “truth, honesty and justice”. Moreover, it displays contempt for the intelligence and the dispassionate objectivity of your readers.

Please make every effort to amend your ways in order that those who turn to your website may find factual information useful for sound judgement and not demogoguery, propaganda, or political rhetoric. If you have trouble discerning what does or does not fall under these categories of dissimulation, ask yourself what would Jesus exaggerate? I think you'll find that the answer would be nothing.

Here is our answer:

Thank you for your comments. You refer to our article URL: https://www.truth-and-justice.info/section28.html. And you say:
“The Parliamentary vote in no way included or advocated the sodomization of any child or student, at school or anywhere else; and certainly not at public or taxpayer expense”.

The article does not contain a statement “The Parliamentary vote included or advocated the sodomization of any child or student, at school or somewhere else”. The essence of the article is as follows:

  1. The vote was on whether local authorities should be allowed to “promote” homosexuality in “maintained” schools. The word “promote” means promoting the idea that homosexuality is a normal, harmless or even beneficial activity. The word “maintained” in this context means financed wholly or partly from public funds, which are collected from the public by some form of taxation.

  2. The objections to the proposed restoration of Section 28 by the members of parliament was not on the grounds that it is not necessary, because (a) to promote homosexuality in any school is a criminal act by the very nature of such activity, and (b) in maintained schools it would also be a gross misuse of public resources for a criminal purpose.

  3. The objections to the proposed restoration of Section 28 by the members of parliament was on the grounds that they did not see promotion of homosexuality in maintained schools as a criminal activity. They saw such activity as normal, harmless or even beneficial, and therefore allowable to be carried on at public expense. And these views were not the result of impartial logical investigation of the phenomenon of homosexuality, and of the consequences of its promotion among children, but on personal attitudes of the members of parliament to homosexuality.

  4. No, they did not suggest that children should be sodomized. And the article does not state that they did. But promotion among children of the ideas that homosexuality is normal activity and even encouraging children to “discover their sexuality”, inevitably leads to sodomization of children. The acts of sodomization are not necessarily carried out by school staff, they are often carried out by children among themselves. Although sodomizations by adults working at schools do happen.

  5. The parliamentary vote was generally seen as a “green light” for promoting homosexuality by the school staff in maintained schools. And such activity had already been going on for some time. Section 28 was an attempt to curb such activity. And its removal from the Act was part of the general efforts to legitimize and promote homosexuality by the government of the time.
Hence the title of the article was: “British Children to be Sodomized at School at Taxpayers Expense — Why?”. Which correctly describes the consequences of the parliamentary vote. This is also dealt with in the last 2 sentences of the article.

We suggest that you reread the article and try to understand what it says, rather than “reading into it” what you “think” it says.

And, if you do find that some statements in our articles are incorrect, then please draw our attention to it. But, please, quote our statements verbatim, by cut‐and‐paste, and deal with what the statement says, rather than seeking to “interpret” it in your own ways.

We also do accept that what we write might be not to the liking of some people or contrary to their views and beliefs. But our concern is with correctness of what we write, rather than with seeking to please everybody.

Thank you for visiting our websites.

This person's argument is a classical example of the “Straw Man Fallacy ”, that is, a false argument in which the arguer imputes to his “opponent” a false statement, which the “opponent” did not make, then refutes this false statement and draws the conclusion that his “opponent” is wrong.

Such techniques are often used by politicians in their arguments. Often with disastrous practical consequences.

And politicians will continue to use fallacious arguments, until use of false arguments by persons holding public office becomes a serious crime punishable by not less than 5 years in jail and disqualification from holding a public office for life.


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