Time Magazine asks Dobson about Mary Cheney's kid

[dewdrop_world]

Let's fire up the word processors and send some letters to Time Magazine. Guess who they asked to write commentary about Mary Cheney's pregnancy?

James Dobson.

That's the most balanced conservative voice they could find?

His piece is just what we might expect: sugarcoated innuendo. Reasonable on the surface but doesn't take too much digging to find the cracks.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...8485-1,00.html

How much satisfaction does a 39-cent stamp buy these days? (Is it still 39 cents?)

James

PS Let's also make sure to be more reasonable than reasonable.

[Jamie McDaniel]

Tomorrow Soulforce will launch a petition asking Time Magazine to check Dobson's facts.

[dewdrop_world]

I will sign that petition.

More ammunition:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200612110002

James

[Jamie McDaniel]

Thanks, dewdrop_world. I just passed that along to the team working on this.

[dewdrop_world]

Here's my letter.

To the Editor:

James Dobson's organization, Focus on the Family, has been criticized for a casual approach to social science research that takes data out of context and ignores results contrary to its predefined position. It is no surprise that his Time Magazine commentary on Mary Cheney's pregnancy indulges in the same half-truths and innuendoes.

Dobson cites two researchers, Kyle Pruett and Carol Gilligan, as evidence of the need for a father and mother. Social conservatives have ridiculed Gilligan's work for years on the grounds that her views on parenting would hopelessly feminize boys. But Dobson glides past the controversy and implies that she supports the same views of fatherhood as he. Anyone familiar with Gilligan's research would recognize the inaccuracy.

Pruett has publicly disavowed Dobson's use of his research, stating that it "couldn't be further from my personal or professional position." Dobson is surely aware of this, but repeats his mischaracterization.

If there is a principled social science position to take against gay parenting, Dobson's consistent misuse of the research makes him the wrong person to make that case. For Time to publish his opinion without thoroughly checking his facts is a regrettable editorial practice indeed.

Sincerely,
James H.

[Emproph]

Originally Posted by Jamie McDaniel

Tomorrow Soulforce will launch a petition asking Time Magazine to check Dobson's facts.

Thank God.

~~
Sorry James but I’m running with this one. I’m not suggesting anyone use my sarcastic bent if they do send a letter but I thought it might help to elucidate the insanely hypocritical parts.

Let the autopsy commence...

But the concern here has nothing to do with politics. It is about what kind of family environment is best for the health and development of children, and, by extension, the nation at large.

Oh really, nothing to do with politics? It’s all about what’s best for the children and the nation?

With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father.

“With all due respect” Dr. Dobson, the same argument could be made to outlaw single parenting and single parent adoption, both of which continue to be legal.

That is not to say Cheney and Poe will not love their child. But love alone is not enough to guarantee healthy growth and development. The two most loving women in the world cannot provide a daddy for a little boy--any more than the two most loving men can be complete role models for a little girl.

Squarely equating a penis with masculinity and a vagina with femininity, and dispelling any “myth” that there are mothers/wives who “wear the pants in the family.” I find it particularly demeaning to equate the characteristics of masculinity and femininity solely upon the basis of one’s genitals.

Anyone who's paid attention to even the stereotypical nature of homosexuality for the past 30 years would be more concerned about having a female influence in a lesbian household and a male influence in a gay-male household.. (duh).

The fact remains that gender matters--According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences.

Still no word yet on why single parenting and single parent adoption are infinitely less important problems.

Other researchers have determined that boys are not born with an understanding of "maleness." They have to learn it, ideally from their fathers.

Got it. All boys need to be "taught" to be attracted to women, and if they do happen to grow up in a matriarchal single parent home they automatically grow up to be gay.

But wouldn't that make single parenting the cause of homosexuality in the first place?

But set aside the scientific findings for a minute. Isn't there something in our hearts that tells us, intuitively, that children need a mother and a father? Admittedly, that ideal is not always possible. Divorce, death, abandonment and unwed pregnancy have resulted in an ever growing number of single-parent families in this culture. We admire the millions of men and women who have risen to the challenge of parenting alone and are meeting their difficult responsibilities with courage and determination. Still, most of them, if asked, would say that raising children is a two-person job best accomplished by a mother and father

We "admire" single heterosexual parents for having “risen to the challenge,” but homosexual couples who actually desire and plan for a child are not only a threat to that child, but also to "the nation at large."

In raising these issues, Focus on the Family does not desire to harm or insult women such as Cheney and Poe. Rather, our conviction is that birth and adoption are the purview of married heterosexual couples.

Which of course is why the pandemic of divorce, single parenting, single parent adoption, and the implications of poverty upon them, are paid lip service every so often – like in this Time magazine article.

Traditional marriage is God's design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth.

You’re a proven liar, hypocrite, and bearer of false witness. With all due respect Dr. Dobson, your “truth” is not Biblically based.

~~
Again, If you're going to write a letter, take James' and Soulforce's non-violent lead on this. The words "liar" and "hypocrite" may be true but are not the most conducive language to use for the sake of "winning hearts and minds." (-Actually maybe they are, but only sometimes)

[dewdrop_world]

More about Dobson's linkage to the Dominionist movement.

http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html

James

[Daniel]

Originally Posted by dewdrop_world

More about Dobson's linkage to the Dominionist movement.

James- thank you for the link. The end of the piece stood out to me for the simple reason that I remember very clearly when Pat Robertson and his ilk came to prominence during my undergrad days at Evangel ('77- '81).

I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the “Christian fascists.”

He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Adams had watched American intellectuals and industrialists flirt with fascism in the 1930s. Mussolini's “Corporatism,” which created an unchecked industrial and business aristocracy, had appealed to many at the time as an effective counterweight to the New Deal. In 1934, Fortune magazine lavished praise on the Italian dictator for his defanging of labor unions and his empowerment of industrialists at the expense of workers. Then as now, Adams said, too many liberals failed to understand the power and allure of evil, and when the radical Christians came, these people would undoubtedly play by the old, polite rules of democracy long after those in power had begun to dismantle the democratic state. Adams had watched German academics fall silent or conform. He knew how desperately people want to believe the comfortable lies told by totalitarian movements, how easily those lies lull moderates into passivity.

Adams told us to watch closely the Christian right's persecution of homosexuals and lesbians. Hitler, he reminded us, promised to restore moral values not long after he took power in 1933, then imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations and publications. Then came raids on the places where homosexuals gathered, culminating on May 6, 1933, with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. Twelve thousand volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a public bonfire. Homosexuals and lesbians, Adams said, would be the first “deviants” singled out by the Christian right. We would be the next.

It really is facism. And they really do want to be us on the altar of their idol, grinning all the while that it's for our own good.

The prevailing message- one that was pounded into students at Evangel during chapel- was that, once one graduated, one was obligated to Christianize America via one's profession.

It has amazed me that, even here, in other threads, there has been disbelief that such a thing can happen in the land of the free. Well. It can, and will, if we all don't do something to stop it.

[novaseeker]

Yes, it certainly can happen. People too quickly forget that Hitler himself came to power democratically and then used his democratically-achieved power base to gradually dismantle the democractic state and transform it into a totalitarian one. Having an underlying democratic system doesn't at all in itself ensure that illiberal and even fascist politics will not, at some point, prevail.

The other thing that tends to be overlooked is how seductive totalitarianism really is. People are seduced by it for the same reasons that they are seduced by fundamentalism in the religious context: it offers a comprehensive, simple, unitary answer to the (in reality) complex, muddy, hard to deal with business of reality. In short, many people prefer simple, straightforward, black-and-white "answers" to the harder business of mudddling through a world of grey, of variation, of diversity. Life can seem much more manageable when the chaos can be ignored, and not dealt with, because everything is definitively dealt with by the totalitarian ideology or fundamentalist belief system. And if you take that innate attractiveness and clothe it in something as comfortable and familiar as religion, the attraction can be almost irresistable for some people.

The good news is that more people are catching on to what is really happening in America these days. More books are being written about it, and the phenomenon has come out into plain view, which is a good thing. What is thoroughly regrettable and, frankly, almost insane, is for a mainstream press publication like Time to be giving an audience to the likes of Dobson to publish his unsupported nonsense regarding issues like this one. I mean, if the editors wanted to include a piece from Dobson, the least that they could have done would have been to include a parallel piece by someone in the mental health and child development fields that actually spoke to the empirical data. Left as it is, Dobson's piece will be read by at least some and perhaps many readers as simply being true, when in fact most developmental psychologists disagree with what he has written there. It's a very odd and sad development for institutions like Time to allow themselves to become the platform for Dobson's propaganda.

[Jamie McDaniel]

The petition is up now.

www.soulforce.org/petition/2

[Vanessa White]

I am all over this...... just signed it. Thanks Jamie!

[marutidas]

I have sign as well,

Drop by drop, change ensues

[keltic63]

I signed. I was thinking that this really could be an important action. If Time realizes that there are enough people calling on them to check out the research that Dobson uses, they may discover that there is a story here! Maybe this will get people thinking. It has always bugged me that Dobson et al can continue to make the claims that they do, and no mainstream media outlet calls it into question.

[andrewlittle]

And ditto on the tally.

[suzer1013]

Signed it!

Susan

[1engelbythesea]

Signed it and passed the word along to others who might not have been alerted.

[dewdrop_world]

Signed, and I sent a personal email to family and friends too.

Thanks for setting this petition up! When I saw the link at the Washington Blade's website, I was pretty horrified and I'm glad we are doing something.

James

[pnggrad79]

I signed it and told Dobson to keep his mouth shut. Funny, how everytime he opens it, he just looks more and more like the buffoon and imbecile he really is.

[Jamie McDaniel]

Originally Posted by andrewlittle

And ditto on the tally.

1,311 at the time of this post.

Our previous petition had a total of 2,857 signatures (2,000 after the first week or two).

Most of the signatures today came from our email list, which is at 12,500 (about 3,500 who regularly open the emails. A 25% open rate is fairly standard for large lists, I understand. Our list size was about 7,000 this time last year, so the organization is growing.)

Hopefully we can get the word out further. You'll notice the petition asks you to forward it to your friends after having signed it.

You all do have justice minded friends outside of Soulforce, don't you.

addendum: Oh the questions we ask of others ought to be asked of ourselves. After writing that, I realized I have not forwarded it to anyone outside of Soulforce. Better go do that.

[Jaroslaw99]

Glad Soulforce is there to counter this garbage. I'm sure these aren't new sentiments, but in one respect, the RR has forced me to become more active and out.

Second, I can't believe more "true Christians" don't denounce people like Dobson. The Psalmist said "create in me a clean heart" and Jesus stressed purity and conscience over rituals and laws.

It should be obvious to the most casual observer of the Religious Right that they outright lie often enough (for only one example, Mr. Pruett saying openly Dobson was misusing his research - hope I got his name right)

God Bless all who signed the SF petition.