When a person calls you hateful, intolerant, bigoted, racist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, hypocritical, et cetera, et cetera when contending for an opposing view, they’ve gotten completely off topic. The simple truth—and an obvious one, I would think—is that you cannot defeat an idea by attacking something else, like someone’s alleged character flaw. Yet it’s done all the time.

It’s been said that when an escaped convict wanted to divert hound dogs that were hot on his scent, he would drag a fish across his trail to distract them, leading them in a fruitless direction so he could evade capture.

Distractions like this happen repeatedly in conversations on weighty matters like public policy debates, but they’re especially evident in the kind of spiritual and ethical discussions you engage in as an ambassador for Christ. Be on the lookout for them.

The rhetorical ploy is generally referred to as a “red herring”—a fallacious maneuver intended to throw you “off the scent” in a discussion, leaving you bewildered and at a dead end in the debate.

I encounter versions of this nuisance all the time—and so do you, though you might not recognize how you’ve been tricked by the ruse. Ironically, even perpetrators of this foolishness don’t recognize their mistake because some red herrings are currently so common in public discussion they seem like solid comebacks. They’re not.

There are lots of ways befuddled thinkers do this, but three popular errors stand out. They’re formally called the ad hominem fallacy, the genetic fallacy, and the straw man fallacy. Don’t worry if the names aren’t familiar to you. You’ll recognize the blunders immediately when I describe them. They’re everywhere.

The ad hominem is the most frequent misstep, outpacing all others in current popularity. The Latin phrase literally means “to the person.” When an opponent deviates from the issue under discussion and instead attacks something about the person he disagrees with—his character, his motives, his education, his ethnicity, etc.—he’s fallen prey to this error.

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