The great Christian theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand once observed that an incomplete truth can be worse than a lie. An incomplete truth can confuse the listener more than a lie and cause more damage. For example, it’s technically accurate to tell young people that sexual activity is a healthy biological activity that releases stress and anxiety , yet if you leave out the part where such activity can be terribly damaging to body and soul if not done within the moral codes that are a part of common sense and long religious wisdom, you send someone on a path of destruction.

A current maestro of the incomplete truth is David French. French is strongly disliked by a lot of conservatives. Some of their attacks on him have been vicious and personal. They believe French, a veteran of the Iraq War who once wrote for National Review, is a squish on some social issues. They’re at least partly right. French is particularly bad on issues having to do with human sexuality, once referring to drag queen story hour as one of “the blessings of liberty.”

French now writes for the New York Times, where his main target every week always seems to be conservatives. In a recent piece, French tells both a lie and an incomplete truth. He wrote: “If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.”

A lot of the right-wing hysterics involves human sexuality, French said. “It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality,” French writes, “you’re not just wrong; you’re a ‘groomer’ or ‘ soft on pedos .’ Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s ‘ pro-pedophile .’ Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then ‘ you are probably a groomer .’”

This is dishonest. One part of it is simply false, and the rest are incomplete truths. It’s false that there is no peaceful disagreement about human sexuality on the Right. I want gay people to have the same rights and happiness as everyone else, yet as a Catholic, there will always be a part of me that thinks marriage is between a man and a woman. (Yes, David, ambivalence does exist on the Right.) I have libertarian and conservative friends who disagree with me on this. In other words, several conservative friends dispute me on a matter of human sexuality. This does not make them, or me, groomers or “soft on pedos,” and no one has ever argued otherwise.

After this false statement, French presents an incomplete truth. To say that Florida’s new law “restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity” is true — but not completely. When it was first passed, HB 1557 restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity, but only for children younger than third grade. (The legislation was recently expanded to ban such instruction through eighth grade). So, in fact, the law does not really restrict teaching on human sexuality; it just creates an age requirement.

Most glaring is the problem of so-called trans women, who are actually men, competing and often dominating in women’s sports and invading private female spaces. French never addresses this problem, or if he does so, it is incompletely, like when he famously said that drag queen story hour is “one of the blessings of liberty.” I would agree with French that performance art such as drag is indeed a result of living in a liberal democracy. The question, however, is whether children should be in the audience. The answer, which French won’t ever commit to, is no.

French wasn’t always so circumspect. In a 2016 profile of French in GQ magazine , writer Jack Moore said that “when [French] was away in Iraq, he forbade his wife from phoning men or using Facebook.” This was explained first in a National Review profile, which noted that while away in Iraq, French’s wife “would not have phone conversations with men, or meaningful email exchanges about politics or any other subject.” Furthermore, GQ observed, French “is pretty anti-trans bathroom access. Like, he writes about it a lot . In fact, he thinks the acceptance of trans people is the work of ‘sexual radicals.’”

The GQ profile included three links to French pieces warning about the irrationality and sexual danger of transgenderism. All three articles have since been removed from the National Review website. Still, others remain. In one , French writes this: “I don’t think our culture should cease efforts towards ending the dangerous notion that men or women should amputate healthy organs in the quest to sculpt their bodies into something they’re not.”

French then says, with emphasis in the original, that transgender people should be treated with dignity, but “that’s not the contemporary legal controversy.” The legal controversy involves allowing biological men into women’s spaces like showers and female sports. This can end up in situations where women’s privacy is violated, French admits. He wrote: “Once you grant the premise that a man is, in fact, a woman, don’t all these consequences flow directly from that concession?”

Yes, they do. That’s the full truth. Ignoring that thesis or insulting those who even bring it up is a tantrum, not a serious argument. And respectfully asking the David French of the New York Times to reply to the David French of National Review is not hostile badgering.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.