Dr.James Dobson is an unflinchingly serious man. He has been a member of a very powerful religio-political group known as The Council for National Policy, a carefully secretive group made up of an assortment of hard right conservatives who want to remake America in accordance with their dogmatic ways. The CNP vetted George W. Bush in 2000 for the far right and also vetted/approved Sarah Palin in Minneapolis this fall.
Dobson has left the realm of Christian counsel and guidance, information and education, and ventured directly into ideological politics. He enters a theater where he is open to close scrutiny and to intense public debate. In politics perception is everything. Dobson must not receive free passes nor should he expect any.
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It’s indeed sad that Dr. Dobson finds himself inextricably driven to enter the murky world of partisan politics, deal making, and influence trading. The New York Times quotes Dobson declaring, "I can’t go back, nor do I want to. I will probably endorse more candidates. This is a new day. I just feel a real need to make use of this visibility."
Like Dickens’ Uriah Heep, James Dobson seeks to cast off personal responsibility and down play his considerable influence and powerbrokering by claiming humility and assigning only a minor role for himself in the current culture war. Dobson vigorously defended himself in the Holland, Michigan newspaper, The Sentinel, in 2005.
Dobson’s personalized words of rebuke, sent to the Sentinel and printed, there were directed toward a Reformed Church in America Hope College instructor’s jocular criticism of Dobson’s condemnation of SpongeBob, the cartoon, for Dobson’s assertion SpongeBod encouraged a gay agenda amongst young children. This incident left unanswered the more serious questions and concerns raised about ultimate Dobson’s purposes and the dangers raised by effects of Dobson’s raging venom against the essayist, Dr.Miguel de la Torre.
James Dobson replied to the de la Torre editorial in the Holland Sentinel,2.11.05 in a very confrontational way:)
What did motivate Rev. de la Torre’s unprovoked attack? What is the hidden agenda that led him to distort the facts and spew his venom in my direction? I submit that it is politics. He is obviously an ultraliberal and I am a conservative. That’s why he is angry. He reveals that bias in the early section of his op-ed piece, when he accused me of taking credit for the re-election of George W. Bush. Again, de la Torre is dead wrong. I have never made such a statement, and have told Time, U.S. News and World Report, TV commentators Hannity and Colmes and other media outlets that my influence in the culture has been grossly overstated. I have taken credit for nothing and I deserve none.
Despite the distortions in the professor’s editorial, I wish him no ill will. I do worry, however, about the students who sit under his liberal tutelage at Hope College. I’m glad my son and daughter are not among them.
(De La Torre subsequently withdrew from Hope College--in part because of the impact of Dobson’s excoriating public criticisms and displeasure, and the strongly worded letters to the editor supporting Dobson. This is the kind of support Focus on the Family enjoys in such locales.)
"James Dobson and his (new) political lobbying group, Focus on the Family Action, were instrumental in keeping the homosexual marriage issue before voters ," according to Christianity Today. CT also admits that Dobson’s calling out SpongeBob, as a sort of Murphy Brown archetype—being a fictional representative of a lack of moral virtue syndrome--led to Dobson being labeled unreasonable. His focus on SpongeBob, given his very serious attempts to take on homosexuality as a national evil, was a supercilious thing to do--even if Dobson had lighthearted humor in mind at the time he made his off-the-cuff remark to a friendly crowd of supporters were Dobson was the featured speaker. At the time Dobson knew what fodder his remarks had generated, much was already being made of SpongeBob by kindred critics of tolerance education. "What's at stake is the forced normalization of homosexuality in the public schools," that’s the objection as framed for Dobson by Tom Minnery, vice president of government and public policy at Focus on the Family Action.
It’s wise to remember "(p)olitics ceases to be understood as a pre-eminently human activity and is left to those who find it profitable, pleasurable, or in some other way useful to themselves. Political action thus comes to be carried out purely for the sake of power and privilege ." This new venture is in sharp contrast to Dobson’s life-long work of helping gospel and nurture of souls.
Dobson appears to have become a demanding, abrasive, and harsh critic of any columnist who cross his political path--as seen in the tone and personal attack he mounted against Dr. de la Torres and Hope College in the Holland Sentinel.
Not long ago Dobson attacked a US Senator, labeling him an "enemy of God’s people." Dobson’s choice of terms is just a small jot or title away from calling the senator an "enemy of God."
An enemy of God or of God’s people--so named by Dobson--could be come, in the minds of many, a dangerous person precisely because Dobson labels him so.
In a world where we go to war against evil, such talk is inflammatory and ill-advised. Just as we have ventured over half a world away to do battle with pagan infidels, how long before we become oppressors or punishers of those stateside who are evil "haters of God’s people" and therefore equally as dangerous as foreign foes?
History tutors us never to say that oppression and physical harm are not possible here in America--should the unbridled power of religion and nationalism be joined in a combative spirit led and directed by the powerful who direct a dutiful following.
The "nature of this war (on Terror) is such that it's heightened the sense that a man of God is in the White House ," said Gary Bauer a long term ally of Dobson’s. Dobson is ardently a defender of George W. Bush, even though the president frequently falls short of Dobson’s mark for righteousness, Dobson’s mouth is sealed against any moral judgments against Bush. God’s will and social justice are subservient to political expediency in Dobson’s master plan.
On social issues "Dobson goes to great length to use Scripture to support his view, and yet according to Time magazine he doesn't even have any formal theological training. In short, Dobson, using his position as a radio psychologist, has set himself up as our moral authority and asks us all to blindly follow," writes one observer.
Dobson has the constitutional right, and can seek to directly influence the politics of America by way of his frequent communication with the many millions of radio listeners (7M) he reaches each week. In spite of his claims to the contrary, ("...(M)y influence in the culture has been grossly overstated. I have taken credit for nothing and I deserve none." Dobson, Holland Sentinel, 2.11.05)
Dobson has become a wielder of tremendous power and uses the cudgel of his influence and organizational activism to make his threats stick. He threatened the re-election efforts of six Senators, and played an active role in defeating the former Democratic Senate leader. Dobson even threatened to derail the President Bush’s reform of Social Security if the Present did not accede to his demands for certain pieces of social legislation.
In his newsletter Dobson developed a strategy which he communicated to his faithful: "To help us prepare for the congressional battle, let me present various points of view and then propose what we at Focus on the Family think is best for or nation's children." He defiantly states that he would "rather die than remain silent" about what he "feels" we need to know about things he feels are "offensive to God Himself." In an 1990 address given by James Dobson to a convention of National Religious Broadcasters...he said: "We are engaged at this time in an enormous civil war of values."
Bauer said. "For years, (Dobson) has tried to make this distinction (that he lacks influence in politics), because his critics accuse him of trying to be a political broker within the Republican Party. Jim never wanted to be and never tried to be what Pat Robertson tried to be in the Republican Party ." However, Robertson’s zenith has largely come and gone, Dobson is, on the other hand, in the ascendancy of power in Washington, and he knows his impact, full well. Was he not placed on the cover of Time Magazine? Dr. Dobson has been described by the New York Times as the "nation’s most influential evangelical leader."
When St. John wrote that "God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son," he illuminated the sacrificial character of divine love. This is the mark of agape. It is entirely selfless. Christian scholars call this kind of love for the unlovable Agape—God’s kind of love. Dobson, in his roil to rid the world of certain sinners and elements he fears and rejects, doesn’t come through as a man brimming with this kind of God’s love. Dobson displays his belief structure as the harsh disciplining father. He lays down the law and demands immediate and compliant obedience. He truly believes his ideas about social morality and civic life are God’s ideas. He has constructed view of the danger posed by homosexuality that he tells his faithful followers is a threat to the entire world.
"Being good politically means not only valuing the things that are truly valuable but also having the strength to defend those things when they are everywhere being attacked and abandoned ."
To however, make the cause of politics identical with the cause of God in ridding the world of sin is dangerous territory, easily given over to fanaticism and dangerous excesses.
Dobson delivered a "demarche" to a meeting of House Republicans in the basement of the Capitol on March 18, 2005. Dobson told GOP leaders exactly how they must act on a range of social-conservative issues, such as abortion, gay rights, and school prayer--or else. Unsatisfied with their response, Dobson went public with a series of unusual interviews in the secular media. Dobson's face appeared on the cover of U.S. News & World Report, below a headline that read, in part, "Now, he has decided the Republican Party must convert or be brought down."
"On Meet the Press, he said that evangelical Christians who put the Republicans in control of Congress in 1994 had been ‘insulted’ and ‘disrespected’ ever since. Asked about the consequences of a walkout, Dobson told Tim Russert, ‘It would be the Democrats in the White House and the Congress, so that would be unfortunate. But you never take a hill unless you're willing to die on it. And we will die on this hill if necessary .’" Those are heat tempered words, the words of a warring cultural crusader, not the affirming and guiding language of a counselor and a beloved behavioral guide.
"Republican leaders are furious with Dobson over these comments, and for good reason. By blackmailing them so openly, he is telling them, in effect, to choose their poison. The GOP can either show Dobson the door, or it can try to move his radical agenda, which calls for, among other things, abolition of the Department of Education and a constitutional amendment to ban abortion. If Republicans stiff him, they may lose a crucial component of their narrow majority. If, on the other hand, they ‘convert,’ they get to watch moderates and economic conservatives flee in horror. In sending a message that the party can't take its conservative base for granted, Dobson also sends a signal to the electorate as a whole: Republicans are being ordered around by a frightening religious zealot ."
"What role did the marriage amendments (and the homosexual marriage issue) play in getting voters—particularly Christians—to the polls ?"
There's no question that Dobson’s effort to protect marriage by promoting the many state marriage referendums certainly helped to energize and engage many Christians in the 2004 election process--the outcome of which Dobson receives much credit for having achieved.
"I have been critical in the past of the church's reluctance to ‘dirty itself’ in these so-called political battles, which are in reality profoundly moral in nature, but I believe this signals the dawn of a new day, " Dobson said. Albeit he must remember that the Founding documents and our constitution prohibit a religious test for public office.
If Dobson applies his vigorous religious testing and finds himself strongly opposed and criticized for doing so, he should not be surprised. Dobson must not be supported in fraudulent notion that such opposition is persecution or hatred directed at his religion, his "being a Christian," but rather opposition may be in strong defense of basic American rights and liberties against those who would abridge or deny those rights
Now the powers of Dobson have brought into tow the "maverick" John McCain. McCain signaled the "morality first" conservatives that he was ready to submit to their demands when he appeared with Jerry Falwell at Falwell’s Virginia bible college. Whereas Dobson, unbending and uncompromised, proclaimed publicly this year he could not support McCain in ’08, the overweening moral scold has just buckled to political necessity. Dobson got his way by compromising his principles.
At the ascendancy of the naïve Charismatic Christian maven, Sarah Palin, to the McCain ticket, Dobson howled and rejoiced.
Dobson and ilk’s angst and long-term crusade to control the president, assumed to be able to appoint justices to the next three or four vacant seats on the U.S. Supreme Court, seems assured if Palin is elected with McCain. That’s what matters, an about face in acceptance of "compromising and unacceptable" of McCain aside.
With a fully packed court, watch the social conservatives and the radical right begin with a vengeance legislating morality and all manner of ideological, corporate, and self-serving legislation from the high bench.
Dobson is using Sarah Palin to boaster his best chance to have influence and control inside the next White House--irrespective of Sarah's total lack of necessary qualifications to be Commander-in-Chief and the potential leader of the free world.
God bless our world. God help us all.