A month ago in An invitation to Pastor Wilson’s defenders I challenged Wilson’s defenders to do any of the following:
- Point out any instances where I criticized Wilson without providing a direct quote.
- Point out any time that I have misquoted Wilson or misrepresented what he wrote.
- Defend any of Wilson’s positions that I had criticized.
Challenges 1&2 were to identify any cheap shots I might have taken against Wilson. The hallmark of a weasely blog post is to make vague statements about another blogger while being careful to not actually quote their words so your readers don’t notice when you fail to get the job done. A similar problem occurs if a blogger misquotes or mischaracterizes another writer’s arguments. None of Wilson’s defenders could find any examples of my having done this.
Challenge #3 wasn’t focused on fairness, but a challenge to his defenders to argue against my criticisms of Wilson. It was a challenge for his defenders to defend Wilson’s ideas. In making this challenge I asked Wilson’s defenders to quote what I actually wrote, giving me the same courtesy I have consistently extended to Wilson. Anything less would be weasely:
Lastly, I would encourage defenders of Pastor Wilson to point out the times I criticized what he wrote when they feel he was right. For example, if like Wilson you believe it would be morally wrong to pass a law that punished a woman in any way for deliberately killing her unborn child or enlisting someone else to help her do this, please respond in the comments saying something to the effect of “Wilson is right. Such a law would be morally wrong because even after the law was passed, women couldn’t possibly understand that it was wrong unless they are an abortion doctor”. Likewise, if you agree with Wilson after further consideration that it is possible to imagine a scenario say 1,000 years from now where it might be moral to pass such a law, please state so in the comments.
To make this as easy as possible for Wilson’s defenders I offered a link to all of my posts related to Wilson and a list of his teachings that they might want to defend. There were no takers.
That had to be incredibly embarrasing for Wilson’s defenders. Surely if I was unfairly criticizing Wilson they should be able to find a single case of me failing to quote him or misquoting him. Barring that, surely they should have been able to find a single example where they agreed with a point by Wilson that I criticized!
I see that Pastor Wilson has now responded, and the good news is his defenders should feel less embarrassed. The reason they couldn’t defend Wilson wasn’t due to a failure on their part, but due to the simple fact that even Wilson can’t defend Wilson. Like his defenders he has no interest in quoting where he disagrees with me and then explaining where he thinks I’m wrong. In fact, all Wilson can bring himself to do is mention my name with a vague insinuation that I’m wrong:
THE DALROCKIAN COMPLICATION:
We live in a time that blames men by default. Our generation blames boys for being boys, it faults men for being men, and it scorns males simply for being males. Resentment of masculinity, and even resentment of residual forms of masculinity, is one of the characteristic sins of our time. So if a marriage melts down, and both husband and wife come out from it telling a horror story about what happened, the wife will get the kind of sympathetic hearing that the husband will almost never get. This is particularly true in vast stretches of the feminized evangelical church.
Now you can’t do that for extended periods of time before a significant number of men begin to kick. They do this in various ways, some godly and some ungodly. Some resort to pornography, others to the MGTOW movement, some muse that sexbots will never become part of the #MeToo movement, others go on marriage strike (Matt. 19:10
), and others go the Dalrock route. And countless others imitate B’rer Rabbit—“he lay low.”
I won’t disagree with Wilson that “others go the Dalrock route” which Wilson explains may be either godly or ungodly, because of course there is nothing to argue with. There is an implied argument there, a suggestion that Wilson has handily defeated my arguments, if only in his head. But Wilson is careful not to divulge what argument of mine is in error, and for good measure he is careful not to even link to or name whatever post contains the argument he imagines he has just defeated.
It is possible however that I’ve misread Wilson’s point. It could be that he doesn’t really imagine that he just secretly defeated one of my arguments, and instead he is offering himself to bear the embarrasment in place of his demoralized defenders. This would explain the title of his post: Take Me Instead. It could be that by taking the weasely way out Wilson actually is deliberately attempting to transfer his defender’s immense embarrasment onto himself. If so, that would be the noblest of weasely moves, and my hat is off to him.
Update: Pastor Tim Bayly has weighed in on the topic (HT princeasbel)
H/T Heidi
