Thank you James Dobson

[Northern_Piper]

@Diogenes the Cynic

One more thing, Dobson is a guy who says that a good way for dads to bond with their sons is to take them in the shower and show them their cocks. The guy is a nutball.

Can you give us a cite for that, Diogenes? I’d be interested in a follow-up.

[Baldwin]

@What the .... ?!?!

Polarizing figures? Did he happen to mention the Rev. Wright in that speech?

Well, since Wright is a pastor of a single church, and (at the time of the speech) unknown to the U.S. public at large, and Dobson has made a career out of blathering to as large an audience as he can manage, I don’t know why he would have.

[Lamar_Mundane]

@What the .... ?!?!

Polarizing figures? Did he happen to mention the Rev. Wright in that speech?

No, but he did mention the Rev. Al Sharpton (in the same sentence). Good enough for you? Was Obama “picking a fight” with Sharpton, too?

[Captain_Amazing]

A few things. First of all, I direct everyone to the survey released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which revealed in part:

57 percent of evangelical church attendees said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.

In all, 70 percent of Americans with a religious affiliation shared that view, and 68 percent said there is more than one true way to interpret the teachings of their own religion.

which suggests that most evangelicals probably agree more with Obama (who can be described as an Evangelical himself) about this than they do with Dobson.

Secondly, Dobson has never spoken for all Evangelicals, and has always been a pretty polarizing figure in the evangelical community.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Don't Call Me Shirley

Wow. Got a cite for this?

Not that I doubt it, mind you.

Here’s the quote

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.

[shudder]

[BrainGlutton]

@Captain Amazing

A few things. First of all, I direct everyone to the survey released Monday by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which revealed in part:

which suggests that most evangelicals probably agree more with Obama (who can be described as an Evangelical himself) about this than they do with Dobson.

Secondly, Dobson has never spoken for all Evangelicals, and has always been a pretty polarizing figure in the evangelical community.

This has actually been going on a lot longer than the religious-right seems to acknowledge. From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind:

Conservatives do not recognize how much the nation has changed since the fifties in its religious attitudes. It may be that the religion of nominal Christians in the United States can no longer be described as traditional trinitarian Christian. The scholarly term for their belief is henotheism, the belief that all ethnic groups and cultures have, and should have, their own gods and rites. In Christian theology, this is the heresy of indifferentism. Robert Linder and Richard Pierard have described the evolution of American civil religion: “Its umbrella has changed from evangelical consensus to Protestantism-in-general, to Christianity-in-general, to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, to deism-in-general.” The decline in belief in Christianity as the only true religion has been extraordinarily rapid in the United States. In a poll taken in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana, 94 percent of high school students agreed that “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.” By the late 1970s, merely 38 percent of respondents in a later poll in Muncie agreed that Christianity was the only true faith. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 1991 poll agreed that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists “pray to the same God.”

Which shows a certain ignorance since Buddhists pray to no god (Buddha himself never claimed to be one nor to speak for one), but it’s still a significant, and salubrious, change.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@What the .... ?!?!

Polarizing figures? Did he happen to mention the Rev. Wright in that speech?

If you think that Wright is a polarizing figure, then you would have to agree with Barack Obama that you don’t want preachers dictating legislation.

[DSeid]

It is especially because of the intervening Wright issue that Dobson attacking Obama is especially good news for Obama. It would be wonderful to get the focus faith and Obama to be on the nature of that sppech he made two years ago, rather than upon the statements made by his former pastor. It would be wonderful to have the discussion be a comparison of Obama’s POV in which the secular need to have a greater respect for the role of faith in political discourse, in which the faithful should less fearful of the values of the secularists, in which both see how much they actually overlap in shared goals, and the POV that one small group should define an agenda according to their own personal religious ideaology. His position there is one that will be reassuring to many of the faithful. Many of the faithful will be more comfortable with that POV than with McCain’s discomfort on matters of faith in the public sphere.

Wright had diminished Obama’s ability to use this almost “post-partisan” perspective on the issue of faith and secularism as a talking point; Dobson’s belated attack is giving him the chance to make that argument all over again and more of a chance to reach the many of faith that find Dobson’s message unattractive.

[tomndebb]

@What the .... ?!?!

Polarizing figures? Did he happen to mention the Rev. Wright in that speech?

In June, 2006, no one outside Chcago knew who Rev. Wright was. It would hardly make sense to point to him when 99% of the audience did not know who he was.

Did you have a point?

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

And he did mention Al Sharpton, so he picked a well-known lefty and a well-known righty, which made his point completely.

[cosmosdan]

@Diogenes the Cynic

Here’s the quote

[shudder]

you should have left in the next part of the quote.
“and in my case, much, much, bigger. I’m looking at you choir ladies ;)”

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

This has actually been going on a lot longer than the religious-right seems to acknowledge. From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind:

Well, while it’s not much of a surprise considering how I feel about Lind, generally, I disagree with his interpretation of the data there. Henotheism is the belief that multiple gods exist, although only one should be worshipped, or worshipped as a primary god. Neither this current study, or the ones Lind quotes shows that people believe that multiple gods really exist.

What the studies show is a growth in tolerance of other beliefs.

[Magiver]

@tomndebb

Really? Dobson’s first attack on McCain as a preesidential candidate did not come out until six or seven months after Obama had made this speech–and long before anyone thought that McCain had a chance at the candidacy.

Making claims about Obama’s purported mistake that requires that the arrow of time be twisted into a pretzel hardly supports your contention.

My contention is that a candidate should not drag people into the spotlight who own barrels of ink. It takes him or her off message when the ink starts to flow.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@Magiver

My contention is that a candidate should not drag people into the spotlight who own barrels of ink. It takes him or her off message when the ink starts to flow.

1. Obama gave that speech two years ago, before he was a candidate for President. Dobson is only responding to it now.

2. He did not attack Dobson in the speech. He only used Sharpton and Dobson as examples of very different sorts of Christian leaders to make the point that there is no consensus as to what constitutes a “Christian” point of view.

3. That “barrels of ink” expression refers to people who own newspapers and have influence over what gets reported. I don’t see how James Dobson falls into that category. He’s a figure of waning importance within a particular political demographic, but he hardly has any great media influence. Obama has far more media influence and public popularity than Dobson does

[Magiver]

@Diogenes the Cynic

1. Obama gave that speech two years ago, before he was a candidate for President. Dobson is only responding to it now.

2. He did not attack Dobson in the speech. He only used Sharpton and Dobson as examples of very different sorts of Christian leaders to make the point that there is no consensus as to what constitutes a “Christian” point of view.

3. That “barrels of ink” expression refers to people who own newspapers and have influence over what gets reported. I don’t see how James Dobson falls into that category. He’s a figure of waning importance within a particular political demographic, but he hardly has any great media influence. Obama has far more media influence and public popularity than Dobson does

You should be Obama’s campaign manager.

[Gangster_Octopus]

Not all Engelicals are forthing idiots. Jim Wallis came out with a statement:

James Dobson, of Focus on the Family Action, and his senior vice president of government and public policy, Tom Minnery, used their “CitizenLink” radio show today to criticize Barack Obama’s understanding of Christian faith. In the show, they describe Obama as “deliberately distorting the Bible,” “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter,” “willfully trying to confuse people,” and having a “fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution.”

Now that James Dobson is insinuating himself into this presidential campaign, his attacks against his fellow Christian, Barack Obama, should be seriously scrutinized. And because his basis for the attack on Obama is the speech the Senator from Illinois gave at our Call to Renewal/Sojourners event in 2006 (for the record, we also had Democrat Hillary Clinton, and Republicans Rick Santorum and Sam Brownback speak that year), I have decided to respond to Dobson’s attacks. In most every case they are themselves clear distortions of what Obama said in that speech. I was there for the speech, Dobson was not.

You can read Obama’s now two-year old speech, which was widely publicized at the time and will see that Dobson either didn’t understand it or is deliberately distorting it. There are two major problems with Dobson’s attack today on Barack Obama.

First, Dobson and Minnery’s language is simply inappropriate for religious leaders to use in an already divisive political environment. We can agree or disagree on both biblical and political viewpoints, but our language should be respectful and civil, not attacking motives and beliefs.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, is the role of religion in politics. Dobson alleges that Obama is saying:

“I [Dobson] can’t seek to pass legislation, for example, that bans partial-birth abortion because there are people in the culture who don’t see that as a moral issue. And if I can’t get everyone to agree with me, it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. … What he’s trying to say here is unless everybody agrees; we have no right to fight for what we believe.”

Contrary to Dobson’s charge, Obama was very strong in defending the right and necessity of people of faith bringing their moral agenda to the public square, and was specifically critical of many on the left and in his own Democratic Party for being uncomfortable with religion in politics.

Obama said that religion is and has always been a fundamental and absolutely essential source of morality for the nation, but also said that “religion has no monopoly on morality,” which is a point that I often make. The United States is not the Christian theocracy that people like James Dobson seem to think it should be. Political appeals, even if rooted in religious convictions, must be argued on moral grounds rather than as sectarian religious demands–so that the people (citizens), whether religious or not, may have the capacity to hear and respond. Religious convictions must be translated into moral arguments, which must win the political debate if they are to be implemented. Religious people don’t get to win just because they are religious. They, like any other citizens, have to convince their fellow citizens that what they propose is best for the common good-- for all of us and not just for the religious.

Instead of saying that Christians must accept the “the lowest common denominator of morality,” as Dobson accused Obama of suggesting, or that people of faith shouldn’t advocate for the things their convictions suggest, Obama was saying the exact opposite–that Christians should offer their best moral compass to the nation but then have to engage in the kind of democratic dialogue that religious pluralism demands. Martin Luther King Jr. perhaps did this best of all with his Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other.

In making abortion the single life issue in politics and elections, leaders from the Religious Right like Dobson have violated the “consistent ethic of life” that we find, for example, in Catholic social teaching. Dobson has also fought unsuccessfully to keep the issue of the environment and climate change, which many also now regard as a “life issue,” off the evangelical agenda. Older Religious Right leaders are now being passed by a new generation of young evangelicals who believe that poverty, “creation care” of the environment, human trafficking, human rights, pandemic diseases like HIV/AIDS, and the fundamental issues of war and peace are also “religious” and “moral” issues and now a part of a much wider and deeper agenda. That new evangelical agenda is a deep threat to James Dobson and the power wielded by the Religious Right for so long. Many evangelical votes are in play this election year, especially among a new generation, and are no longer captive to the Religious Right. Perhaps that is the real reason for James Dobson’s attack today on Barack Obama.

[Simplicio]

@Magiver

My contention is that a candidate should not drag people into the spotlight who own barrels of ink. It takes him or her off message when the ink starts to flow.

I feel confident Dobson was already well in the national spotlight circa 2006, and had no need of Obama to “drag” him there. Indeed that was why he was mentioned by Obama, his name was basically a placeholder for: “well known conservative religious leader”.

In any case, even if he isn’t endorsing McCain, Dobson was going to find one way or another to inject himself into the '08 campaign. The fact that his current pretext for doing so is so flimsy (a passing mention of his name by a candidate in a two year old speech), is just evidence of that fact. Had Obama never made that speech, Dobson would’ve found some other triviality to use as a device for getting his say in.

[cosmosdan]

@Gangster Octopus

Not all Engelicals are forthing idiots. Jim Wallis came out with a statement:

Good for you JW. Way to spell it out.

[wolfman]

@Diogenes the Cynic

[shudder]

I’m not quite sure what the shudder is for. I think every little kid who has ever lived has seen mom and dad naked in the shower after pulling the curtain back. And I know lots of parents who end up showering with their kids in the 3-5 age or so because they need a shower, the kid needs a shower, and they can’t keep an eye on them if the parents are in the shower while the kid is outside. Don’t most kids end up with the “penis/vagina/why is there hair there speech” after a shower realization?

After a certain age it becomes wierd, but parents who are that afraid little johnny may see bits, seem the wierer ones to me.

[Diogenes_the_Cynic]

@wolfman

I’m not quite sure what the shudder is for. I think every little kid who has ever lived has seen mom and dad naked in the shower after pulling the curtain back. And I know lots of parents who end up showering with their kids in the 3-5 age or so because they need a shower, the kid needs a shower, and they can’t keep an eye on them if the parents are in the shower while the kid is outside. Don’t most kids end up with the “penis/vagina/why is there hair there speech” after a shower realization?

After a certain age it becomes wierd, but parents who are that afraid little johnny may see bits, seem the wierer ones to me.

It’s not the showering with the kid, per se, it’s Dobson’s glee about the thought of showing a kid how big his cock his. Why does he think that’s important?