James Dobson, Burn in Hell
James Dobson is dead. Finally. This awful homophobe made the world a significantly worse place by his living in it. His brand of hate was tremendously influential in the modern Republican Party. Future Americans should look at Dobson with contempt and disgust, much like the racist scum of our collective past and of the Trump administration today.
Born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana, that town that has provided nothing but wonderful gifts to American life, Dobson grew up in the Nazarene church. The Nazarenes are pretty far out fundamentalist. Dancing and movies were pure sin and any good Nazarene could not be involved in such horrors. And Dobson was fully immersed in that. His father was an uneducated iterant minister traveling through the Southwest, where this stuff had its strongest pull.
Dobson became interested in psychology, which was also seen as sinful by a lot of his fellow religionists. Nonetheless, he thought he could serve the Lord by attaching that to Christianity. He developed a combination that was the worst of both evangelicalism and psychology, creating a special category of evil in the world. He went to what is today Point Loma Nazarene University and then finished a doctoral degree in psychology at the University of Southern California in 1967. Unfortunately, the sins of the secular hells of higher education did not rub off on Dobson and he came out of that as determined to spew his fundamentalism as ever. In fact, he stayed on at USC as a Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine. And he was there for 14 years, so he still had steady work while he pushed his grift, which was mostly at first about hitting the kid so the little brat behaves.
From the very beginning of his public career, Dobson was horrible. He came to public light in 1970 with his child raising manual, Dare to Discipline. This book made him the anti-Benjamin Spock. It was openly pro-corporal punishment. He claimed to oppose child abuse, but his guidelines on this was much more vague than it was on beating the crying kids. It was supposed to be about self-control and if anyone ever moved beyond that to the point that they enjoyed whacking the little brat then they shouldn’t be hitting their kids. But how can one even know this at the time?
In a follow-up book The Strong-Willed Child, which also advocated beating the hell out of the brats, Dobson stated about how long the beating should go on, “Yes, I believe there should be a limit. As long as the tears represent a genuine release of emotion, they should be permitted to fall. But crying quickly changes from inner sobbing to an expression of protest … Real crying usually lasts two minutes or less but may continue for five. After that point, the child is merely complaining, and the change can be recognized in the tone and intensity of his voice. I would require him to stop the protest crying, usually by offering him a little more of whatever caused the original tears.” Ah yes, keep hitting the child until their will gives up. What can go wrong?
And it wasn’t just kids that he urged hitting. It was also the family dog! What is it with right wingers and abusing dogs? He described his dachshund—named Sigmund Freud—not wanting to go into its enclosure. So he got the belt. Here’s the relevant passage in The Strong-Willed Child. “I had seen this defiant mood before and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud….. “I hit him again and he tried to bite me . . . That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt.”[1] This was an object lesson on how to raise both animals and children for James Dobson! No wonder he was so popular among evangelicals. His love of patriarchal violence fit their world vision seen as under threat by people who don’t…..beat dogs and children, not to mention think people should love who they want and have control over their own reproductive system.
Dobson had his strong grift going. It was always connected to evangelicalism. But in the 1970s, it wasn’t explicitly political. That would change with the 1980s. Dobson moved into the national political realm in 1981, with the founding of the Family Research Council. Building on the rising putrescence of right-wing evangelicalism in American politics as the Reagan era began, the Family Research Council became a leading organization in the fight to repeal the second half of the twentieth century. This was the nakedly political arm of Dobson’s organization, attempting to influence politics, and especially Republican politics, to a hard-right stance on social questions, especially against feminism and homosexuality. He founded it with other right-wing authoritarian psychiatrists. From the beginning, it worked closely with the Reagan administration and was led by a former Health and Human Services official from the Reagan years. Its official website stated that its mission was that “Believing that God is the author of life, liberty, and the family, FRC promotes the Judeo-Christian worldview as the basis for a just, free, and stable society.”[2]
Thus it was not only homophobic, but Islamophobic and anti-Semitic. It made claims that the Democratic Party is controlled by Jews. Dobson headed this until the early 1990s, when its obvious political aims threatened the tax-exempt status of the entire operation. So the FRC was spun off to be run by the equally odious Gary Bauer and today Tony Perkins. Now this is a rogue’s gallery of right-wing authoritarian crypto-fascists. The Southern Poverty Law Center has long called out the FRC as a hate group, noting its claims that gays are actually pedophiles and exposing that its so called “policy experts” are just right-wing hacks pretending to know anything.
And then there is Focus on the Family. Founded in 1977 by Dobson, this organization, based first in California, has been the cornerstone of hard-right evangelicalism ever since. Along with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, Focus on the Family was the most important institution in terms of building up right-wing support for the culture wars that dominated our national politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and still do to a great extent today. At its core was its daily radio show carried on over 200 stations around the country starting in 1980. In 1988, Focus on the Family went even more overtly political, starting a policy arm intended to directly influence politicians to push for evangelical political priorities, especially repressing women and gays.
In 1991, Focus on the Family moved to Colorado Springs. This put it on the front lines of Colorado’s infamous Amendment 2, in 1992, restricting rights for gay people in the state. Dobson was a huge supporter of this, rallying the evangelical community to protect our nice white children from such horrors as books like Heather Has Two Mommies and other literature that in the thirty years since has clearly destroyed American civilization. Amendment 2 passed and Dobson’s power seemed to grow enormously because of it, even as the nation as a whole moved toward accepting gay marriage, though I would not be confident that continues.
Dobson became the most notorious figure on the evangelical right in these years and as such, there were some awesome protestors against he and his band of hatemongers. In 1993, Focus on the Family opened a new campus. The Lesbian Avengers disrupted the event. In fact, the Focus on the Family campus has long been a center of protest for gay rights activists. In 2005, Mel White, a gay pastor, held a big protest in front of the Focus headquarters, where he wanted to meet with Dobson. White said, “Dobson has become the primary source of misinformation about gay and lesbian people in the world. He is single-handedly doing more damage to the truth than anyone else, in our opinion.”[3] Hard to argue. This is the kind of horrible person that Dobson was. He did not meet with White. And yet, amazingly, even more evil right wing pastors also protested at the Focus headquarters, saying that Dobson did not hate abortion enough![4] The level of sheer vile evil at the core of American evangelicalism simply has no bottom.
For some reason, Dobson interviewed Ted Bundy on live TV the day before the latter was executed. It was done to serve Dobson’s interests. Bundy claimed that the reason he killed 50 women is that he looked at pornography. Given that fighting the smut industry was central to Dobson’s mission, he was able to raise a ton of money of these tapes and then donate a portion of the proceeds to anti-porn groups he was associated with. But it was the kind of publicity hound shallow exploitation to promote himself that was at the core of Dobson’s actual ideology, whatever he may have stated about politics.
What really obsessed Dobson was THE GAYS. The idea of non-heterosexual sex was horrifying to this man. If anything should define Dobson’s awful life, it’s the homophobia. When the Sandy Hook massacre happened, Dobson blamed it on God punishing America for allowing gay sex, stating “I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God almighty, and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”[5] He wrote books on the topic of gay sex, such as 2004’s Marriage Under Fire: Why We Must Win This Battle.
I don’t know about you all, but I can tell you my marriage really went downhill after gay people were able to get married. I mean, we both started getting into animals and everything else that Dobson predicted would happen. What’s even the point of marriage anymore now that I know some dudes are doing it next door to me. When will it stop? WHEN WILL IT STOP! Dobson was all about gay conversion therapy too, constantly promoting this horrible self-denial and self-hatred in the guise of medicine.
And how to stop boys from becoming gay? Dobson believed that fathers should whip out their dick and show it to the boy so that they become real pussy-loving men! No, seriously, he specifically promoted this passage in a friend’s manuscript:
Meanwhile, the boy’s father has to do his part. He needs to mirror and affirm his son’s maleness. He can play rough-and-tumble games with his son, in ways that are decidedly different from the games he would play with a little girl. He can help his son learn to throw and catch a ball. He can teach him to pound a square wooden peg into a square hole in a pegboard. He can even take his son with him into the shower, where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.[6]
Dobson continued to push his grotesque culture war at every moment possible. The We Are Family Foundation, a group dedicated to promoting diversity in all ways, sent out a DVD to schools using cartoon characters such as Sponge Bob Square Pants to promote their message. For Dobson, this was the GAY AGENDA in action to convert our good American kids to be the queers. He stated, “childhood symbols are apparently being hijacked to promote an agenda that involves teaching homosexual propaganda to children.” And because Dobson and his people were so loud and had so many allies, those videos were pretty much not used in the classroom. A potentially high-quality educational tool was squashed by someone opposed to the entire last century of progress and the educational world caved to him.
Dobson left Focus on the Family in an official capacity in 2003, with the organization first taken over by former Reagan Cabinet official Don Hodel and then by Jim Daly, who attempted to give a slightly softer touch to the same hate. But that by no means instituted that Dobson was going to disappear from the scene. Quite the contrary. By 2004, Dobson was targeted fellow Republicans. He led a campaign to deny Arlen Specter the position of the head of the Senate Judiciary Committee because the Pennsylvanian was pro-choice. This didn’t work, but it did help foment the unrest against Specter that forced him to switch to the Democrats in order to vainly try to help save his career since he had no chance for reelection as a Republican. Dobson specifically rejected the idea of the Republicans as a big-tent party, stating, “I don’t want to be in the big tent … I think the party ought to stand for something.” Well, he’s pretty much won that battle as the Republican Party primarily today stands for a fascism Dobson was always comfortable with.
That same year, many credited Dobson with getting evangelicals out to vote for George W. Bush, suggesting that he was the critical factor in helping Bush win Ohio and Florida. It’s certainly more complicated than this, but there’s little question he had become the leading evangelical voice in politics by this time. He thought of himself this way too. When a top Bush staffer called Dobson to thank him for the help in the election, he started lecturing the staffer about how if Bush didn’t take stronger stands against gay rights, there would be hell to pay in 2008. Well, Republicans did have hell to pay that year but it most certainly wasn’t because Dobson was angry about Bush’s relative indifference to homophobia.
Dobson was also on the “judges are activists and this is bad by which I mean judges should be conservative activists” kick. In 2005, he co-wrote (or “co-wrote” more likely) a book titled Judicial Tyranny: The New Kings of America with such brilliant lights of American conservatism as Roy Moore, Ed Meese, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafly. He spent time on all the other idiocies of the right-wing movement as well. He talked about how the universe was created by “intelligent design” and that evolution was a hoax. Of course, once conservative activists started rewriting the Constitution to create a revanchist America dedicated to false visions of the past, Dobson never said a word because he loved those kinds of activist judges.
In 2008, Dobson couldn’t stand the idea of John McCain winning the nomination. So he threw his support behind the lovely figure of Mike Huckabee. He hated McCain. But then he also hated Barack Obama. Before the election, Dobson went ballistic over Obama’s 2006 “Call to Renewal” speech because Obama had called Dobson out specifically. Obama had stated: “Would we go with James Dobson’s [interpretation] or Al Sharpton’s? Which passages of Scripture would guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which says that slavery is OK but eating shell fish is an abomination… Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount — a passage that is so radical that it’s doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application?”
Dobson responded in 2008 that Obama knew nothing of the Bible and that “I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology.” Shortly before the election, Dobson released something called “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America.” In it, he listed all the horrible things that were going to happen in the next four years. To quote this article on it at HuffPost,
It apocalyptically depicts terrorist attacks in American cities, churches losing their tax exempt status for not allowing gay marriages, pornography pushed in front of our children, doctors and nurses forced to perform abortions, euthanasia as commonplace, inner-city crime gone wild because of lack of gun ownership, home schooling banned, restricted religious speech, liberal censorship shutting down conservative talk shows, Christian publishers forced out of business, Israel nuked, power blackouts because of environmental restrictions, brave Christian resisters jailed by a liberal Supreme court, and finally, good Christian families emigrating to Australia and New Zealand.[7]
Sweet. I especially love the idea of New Zealand as Christian paradise.
Dobson left Focus on the Family entirely in 2009, in a somewhat acrimonious divorce that ended his radio show sponsored by the organization. It seems that the reason for this was Focus on the Family trying to provide a softer image. Now, I found the infamous Focus Super Bowl anti-abortion ad featuring Tim Tebow in 2010 utterly offensive. But for Dobson and other hardcore right-wingers, the ad was so soft as to say nothing about abortion at all.[8] What a bunch of sellouts!
Dobson continued to hate Barack Obama. In 2014, he called him “the abortion president” in public speeches. He even said this at the National Day of Prayer event at the Capitol, which is supposedly to be a nonpartisan event, saying, “President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president. He didn’t make any bones about it. This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense he is the abortion president.” Democrats were outraged. On the other hand, the entire National Day of Prayer is a Cold War relic created by Congress in 1952 to show those godless communists who was right. So Dobson acting in this capacity was somewhat fitting with the legacy of McCarthyism that the nation has never truly dealt with to the present.
Through the rest of his life, Dobson’s bread and butter remained his atrocious childrearing advice books. To say the least, I am not going down this mango expedition to actually read them, but they include such great sounding titles as The New Dare to Discipline (1996), The New Strong-Willed Child (2007), and Bringing Up Girls: Practical Advice and Encouragement for Those Shaping the Next Generation of Women (2010). I love that most of these seem to be basically rewrites of the older books. After all, have to keep that cash flowing in from the suckers. In 2010, he made sure to have that consistent outlet to cash and attention by starting his daily radio show, Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson. After all, those evangelicals need to hear repeated messages about how you should beat your children and vote for noted Christian Donald Trump.
Dobson continued being a grotesque cancer on America until the end of his life. Like a lot of right-wingers, he wasn’t immediately on the Trump Train, preferring Ted Cruz. But that was only because he didn’t think he could trust Trump to be the fascist Dobson always hoped would transform America. Once Trump proved to indeed be that fascist, Dobson got on board. He was a huge supporter of Roy Moore’s Senate run in Alabama. After all, at least Roy trying to pick up young girls at the mall meant he wasn’t gay. I guess Moore’s father showed him his penis. After the 2020 elections, he lamented the defeat of God’s right-hand man, Donald Trump. Let us quote some of this heartfelt letter:
Dear Friends,
There is a heaviness within my spirit today on behalf of our beloved nation. I’m sure I share that sentiment with many of you. In a sense, Shirley and I are also grieving over the potential passing of an era, during which I believe God gave America a spiritual reprieve. President Donald Trump was partially responsible for this crucial change of trajectory.He isn’t a perfect man, and his relationship with the Lord is a very private matter. But he attempted during the first four years of his presidency to get acquainted with, to honor, and to learn from Christian leaders. He is very close to Rev. Franklin Graham, Dr. Robert Jeffress, Rev. Paula White, Dr. Jack Graham, former Governor Mike Huckabee, and at least 30 others, including myself. He once said while greeting us at a formal dinner, “This is your house. Welcome to it.” He then led us on a tour upstairs in the private residence.
People who know the President best tell us he is one of the most hard-working and dedicated men ever to serve in the Oval Office. We saw that indefatigable nature during his final campaign, when he once held nine rallies in two days. He is also remarkably resilient. The media and his political opponents hammered him every day for four years. There was never a respite. President Trump arose every morning knowing he would be unfairly ridiculed and attacked from morning to night. This criticism began before he was elected and continued throughout his presidency. Nevertheless, he stood like a rock and his list of accomplishments could fill a book.
Joe Biden and the Democrats also support open borders. So much for the wall! That means that people around the world will be invited to enter this country legally and take up permanent residence within it. From the day of their arrival, they will be entitled to free welfare, free legal services, free medical care, free education, and who knows what else. Millions of people must be out there thinking, “How can I get to that promised land?”
We have also been told to expect trillions of dollars to be spent for the foolishness of the Green New Deal, with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez at the helm. That could bankrupt the nation. And can you imagine how Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will deal with hostile governments, including those in China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? That is an international nightmare in the making.
The institution of the family will find no friends in the White House or in the halls of Congress. Taxes are likely to skyrocket for middle-class parents and others. We can also expect unprecedented assaults on religious liberty and churches could be stripped of Constitutional protection. Also at risk are our Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, and other provisions within the U.S. Constitution. Democrats are talking about defunding the police and even the military. Radical change is about to descend on the nation. America is about to be over-run by the most leftist regime in history.
If that sounds discouraging and hopeless, we have to remember Who is in charge here. I believe the Almighty has had His hand of protection on this land since the days of its founding fathers. Our ancestors cried out to Him at Valley Forge, Gettysburg, Midway, and Normandy. I don’t believe He has forsaken us now. So how do we explain the predicament that confronts us? I don’t know. Millions of people have been praying about the outcome of this election because we knew it would have such profound moral and spiritual implications. But who can discern the mind of God?[9]
Who indeed can discern the mind of God? Only James Dobson evidently.
Dobson’s son, presumably after a childhood of beatings, has now continued dad’s grift. He has his own spin on it—the punk Christian right-winger, which is something that we’ve seen a lot in the last 25 years or so, or really going back to hippies for Jesus in 1967 or so. He now offers seminars in child rearing, sex, and all sorts of things that I really don’t want to hear from anyone named Dobson.[10] Evil can never truly be eliminated from the world. It just gets passed down from generation to generation, usually through atrocious parents such as James Dobson passing down their pathologies to their children.
The impact of James Dobson on this nation will be felt for a very long time. Few Americas in the late twentieth and early twentieth centuries did more to make the nation a less tolerant, more homophobic, more misogynist, more child abusing nation than James Dobson. His life is a horror show and the America of Trump is very much James Dobson’s vision. Good riddance to bad rubbish. At least these people do die eventually.
