Gay Menace: McCain on Dobson's S---list, Again
Submitted by Bill Prendergast on May 20, 2008 - 9:52am.
Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family was on the radio last night instructing millions of conservative evangelical listeners to FREAK OUT to the HOMOSEXUAL PANIC!
Dobson interrupted an ongoing series of talks on the subject of “forgiveness” to alert his national audience to the crisis: the California appellate court decision recognizing that “gay marriage is legal in that state.”
Included in the conversation were Tom Minnery, Senior Vice President of Government and Public Policy for Focus on the Family, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council (in 1996 Perkins paid former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke $82,000 for use of his mailing list in connection with a Louisiana political campaign.)
(continued)
If you don’t know who Perkins and Minnery are, don’t worry about it: just pretend that Dobson is holding a discussion of the issue with two hand-puppets and you’ve got the picture. On the air, they did the usual homophobic tailspin Focus on the Family does whenever a pro-gay rights decision comes down from the court (“judicial tyranny,” “the family is being attacked,” “this decision will lead to legitimized polygamy and incest.”) But then Dobson and Minnery went into this, broadcast coast to coast:
Dobson: …Then we’ve got the three presidential candidates—Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama—Have you all noticed, to my knowledge and I watch very carefully what these candidates are doing—Not one of them has made reference in any way at all to the pressures and the dangers and the problems faced by the family, or by the need to preserve marriage. None of them. And all three of them voted against the amendment to protect marriage in Constitution. So we just don’t have a whole lot of assistance. They don’t give a hoot about the family, or they’d talk about it. John McCain didn’t even mention it in his speech on Thursday after the decision was handed down by the California Supreme Court. Is that of concern to you guys?
Minnery: Well, yeah, there was a tepid response put out by the McCain campaign but I gotta tell you, on the day of that decision, Tony and I and several others were meeting with some people from that campaign to talk to them about the issues. And we said, “Look—this is the day when something bold has to be said by your candidate if we are gonna have some belief in that candidate. And we didn’t get a whole lot out of him, so this is really sad. And of course we tried to get the Federal Marriage Amendment through the Senate back in 2005, 2006, because then it was in relatively conservative hands. Now it is in the hands of left-wing liberals under Democrat (sic) control and there’s absolutely no chance, so now it’s up to a state by state fight (…)
Dobson: Well, maybe you heard something from Senator McCain that I didn’t, obviously you did—but I have heard this: that he thinks that marriage should be protected by the states and defined by the states. He calls it a “federalist” issue.
We have just seen now that the states can’t protect marriage because the courts will pre-empt the voters and the legislators. And so what that means is that we could have fifty different definitions of marriage. In fact, Barack Obama said that each state should make up its own mind about what marriage is. If you had that, what chaos, where a family could be married in Oklahoma and not married in Pennsylvania. It would be ridiculous. And yet this is what our presidential candidates—all three of them—favor.
…
Minnery: Let me go back to one of the statements that you just made about the presidential candidates. John McCain, the Republican candidate is a candidate who said that he would support marriage amendments at the state level, and we already said there was no strong response after this California decision. Well, hello, Senator: there is a marriage amendment that is stuck in the state legislature in your home state, Arizona, and I have to tell our listeners, Dr. Dobson—I have tried to get the McCain people to understand: Now is the time to get this out of your home state legislature and get it to the people in the fall. But he has not chosen to get into the marriage amendment in his home state of Arizona. In fact, it’s being held up in the state senate, not by Democrats but by Republicans…
Here’s what the McCain campaign actually said, after the California decision came down last week:
"John McCain supports the right of the people of California to recognize marriage as a unique institution sanctioning the union between a man and a woman, just as he did in his home state of Arizona. John McCain doesn't believe judges should be making these decisions."
Last week the mainstream media take on the California decision was that it was going to help the GOP this year--you know; "divisive," "a wedge issue"="good for Republicans." But Dobson and the religious right are capable of turning this decision into “the mummy’s curse” of the McCain campaign.
Earlier this year McCain was in New Orleans trying to win over the Council for National Policy (the temporal lords of the religious right in America; Dobson and Perkins are among their number.) The CNP directs political propaganda and organizations that influence tens of millions of evangelical GOP voters. And now (a couple of months later) here is Dobson on the most influential evangelical broadcast in the country, comparing McCain to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton as an appeaser of gay marriage. That’s bad, real bad, for McCain.
If Obama raises the vote total by new millions (as his enthusiasts claim will happen), John McCain will need every single conservative evangelical vote he can get. Mentioning McCain in the same breath with the liberals Clinton and Obama when the issue is homophobia--is a dire warning to McCain from Dobson: get into line with us real soon, or we are going to make your summer very tough indeed.
When Dobson starts “going after” McCain for “not giving a hoot about the family” in the context of homophobia—that makes McCain’s campaign people’s eye twitch and triggers spurts of acid in their stomachs. For those of you who don’t know, Dobson, his Focus on the Family organization, and its political wing the Family Research Council, are extremely influential in districts with high numbers of evangelical voters. They politicize this audience, help to organize them into local pressure groups, and get them to turn up in force at election time—often making the conservative difference in local, state, and congressional elections. They made the conservative difference in the last two presidential elections, too. Just because you don’t think anything of them or their agenda, don’t think that they don’t matter. A thumbs down on John McCain, from these powerbrokers, is manna from heaven for the Dems.
And this same week, the religious right threw down another gauntlet at McCain’s feet: Mike Huckabee announced that he would indeed be interested in being McCain’s running mate. I’ve written in before about how the religious right could use the veep slot to succeed the ailing and aged McCain without an election. Now we see them trying to “corner” McCain and strongarm him into putting Huckabee (or some evangelical favourite like Huckabee) on the ticket with him.
And how did that Focus on the Family broadcast end? Dobson and company returned to how polygamy, group marriage, and incest are inevitable if gay marriage is allowed to stand. Finally a pastor finally came on and ended the show with a prayer to God to help them "stop this shit, now." Then a guy came out and told the audience how important it was to send Dobson more money--but that's not news, these guys always do that when they talk about God.
(The broadcast date, again: Monday, May 19, 2008, entitled “California’s Attack on Trad. Marriage,” and here is a link:)
http://www.focusonthefamily.com/popu...
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Actual Press Release
The scary part of this is how this group is taking progressive phrases and incorporating them, look at my highlights:
- May 15, 2008
Colorado Springs, Colo. – Focus on the family founder and Chairman James C. Dobson, Ph.D., issued the following statement today in response to a California Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in that state:
“In 1863, Abraham Lincoln said in the Gettysburg Address that ours is a government ‘of the people, by the people and for the people.’ Well, not in the state of California, where four imperious and unelected justices have just overridden the will of the voters. In 2000, Proposition 22 defined marriage as being exclusively between one man and one woman; the initiative passed by an overwhelming margin of 61 to 39 percent. That emphatic expression of the will of the people has now arrogantly been declared null and void.
“In so doing, the justices have undermined and endangered the basic building block of society, which has been honored and preserved in every nation on earth through most of human history. What an outrage. It will be up to the people of California to preserve traditional marriage by passing a constitutional amendment in the November elections. Only then can they protect themselves from this latest example of judicial tyranny.”
(Dobson Focus on the Family)
More importantly, this was a conservative court, why did they do this, it makes no sense. I think this was deliberately set up to mobilize the Dobson base. Is there anyone who knows the California court better, who could tell us if this was deliberately set up? Yep, there is evidence that this was a setup.
- The decision was a bold surprise from a moderately conservative, Republican-dominated court that legal scholars have long dubbed "cautious," and experts said it was likely to influence other courts around the country....
University of Santa Clara law professor Gerald Uelmen, who has closely followed the state high court for decades, said he was "blown away" and "very surprised" by the ruling....
He added that the issue was likely to affect the political debate even outside California.
"It is going to give some new teeth to an issue that was losing its potency in terms of being a wedge issue," Sears said.
(LA Times)
Interesting that "limited" government is used against justices even while at the end of the broadcast, this broadcast wants a strong top down federal action to force people to the Dobson version of marriage and family.
The Emotions
I listened to this broadcast, to hear the emotions.
The first theme is savory feel of condemnation and judgment, mixed in with sexual titillation. At the beginning, it has the feeling of a stoning or a lynch mob. It is an emotional call to action.
GK, it's clear you don't listen to Focus On the Family regularly
The emotions you're talking about are a regular part of the broadcast--that's part of the reason that millions of Americans turn in to this broadcast, to hear that condemnation and soft bigotry. And feeding their fears enables Dobson and his ilk to direct that same audience--in churches, in Republican delegate events, melting down phone lines of politicians that Dobson disagrees with, getting voters to support Dobson candidates at the polls here in Minnesota.
If a lynch mob ever was formed on the basis of the paranoia Dobson's spreading--I'm sure that Dobson and his lieutenants would codemn the lynch mob--but what he'd be criticizing would be their chosen means of political expression, not the immorality of choosing to live in irrational fear.
When are they going to get it....
The biggest threats to me spending quality time with my kids is the financial pressures of paying for health care, high gas prices, high daycare costs, high food costs and so on. Why do these fools own the brand of family values? None of their policies actually strengthen the family, or support more time with the family. How did progressives not attain the family values brand?
Thanks,
Alec
Justice will only exist where those not affected by injustice are filled with the same amount of indignaation as those offended.
You are correct
Basically political branding has nothing to do with logic or with facts.
The Democratic party has always been a stronger proponent of supporting families. I never found one person who could say that their marriage was personally hurt by a gay marriage. However, I hear many hurt stories from 1) our broken health care insurance 2) our unregulated and crazy foreclosure crisis 3) cancer, autism and other medical problems coming from environmental pollution 4) lack of jobs, daycare and good education 5) lack of cheap mass transportation to get to work without spending the gas cost for a single car 6) lack of developing local sustainable power like wind power instead depending on expensive foreign imports. Minnesota Brown just posted one example.
Even the spiritual branding has nothing to do with logic or with facts. In the Christian religion, the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount makes a strong case for peace and for helping other countries, not war and not torture. Even though the fact of being gay is well documented in the time of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, notice that gay does not even get a mention in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount.
They own "the brand" of family values because...
...they marketed that phrase, hard and successfully. It's a "code" phrase. It doesn't mean what it would mean to an objective observer: it doesn't refer to government policies that would help families with "real world" problems like the economy and access to affordable health care. It doesn't mean that at all; in fact, those particular policies would be denounced by "family values" promoters as "socialist" and "unamerican."
"Family values" means whatever agenda is being promoted by the national evangelical political movement at any given moment. If you understand the phrase for what it is--a cynical marketing term that stands for a sectarian political agenda--you won't ever be disappointed when you find that "family values" isn't about American families. It's about fear, paranoia, the evangelical culture's siege mentality.