Jimmy Two Ways

Any of you readers who made the jump with me from my non-anonymous blog are already quite familiar with my thoughts on James Dobson, father of Christian extremism, ghost-writer of faith-based legislation, and fear-mongering fascist currently at the helm of “Focus on the Family” and the American evangelical movement.

The genesis of my loathing (pun fully intended) started in the fifth grade, when my parents chickened out of giving me "the talk" and instead plugged in a tape of Dobson explaining how babies (and sin, depending on some rather arbitrary technicalities) are made. He said the word “puberty” as if it were spelled “pooberty,” and though I was pretty religious at the time, I couldn’t get past it.

There are several resources on the Web for those interested in a library of Dobson’s crimes against humanity, so I’ll stop short of launching into a redundant rant. There’s a rather astonishing glimpse of the making of Dobson’s tyrannical obsession with phantom attackers of American families here, and a well-penned article on a range of his colorful views, including homosexuality here.

Dobson’s twitchy trigger finger squeezed off the Religious Right’s opening salvo for the 2008 general election recently, slamming Obama for deliberately distorting Biblical passages in a June 2006 speech to a progressive Christian group Call to Renewal. In challenging Christian leaders to balance biblical principles with reasonable policymaking, Obama asked, “Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy? Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? Or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount?” Good questions. Later in the speech, he added, “Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values. It requires their proposals be subject to argument and amenable to reason.”

Perfectly reasonable, to the reasonable.

"What the senator is saying there, in essence, is that 'I 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,' " Dobson said, reiterating that he is not, in fact, a reasonable person. "And if I can't get everyone to agree with me, than it is undemocratic to try to pass legislation that I find offensive to the Scripture. Now, that is a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution,” Dobson added. Dobson also chastised Obama for referencing obscure Old Testament passages covering “antiquated” things like dietary code which are apparently rendered irrelevant by the messages and themes in the New Testament, a common tactic Evangelical apologists employ in contemporizing Christianity to excuse itself of passages demonizing ever-changing cultural trends.

Dobson should be aware, however, that the only outright commentary on homosexual behavior (which he has lambasted here, here, and here) in the bible is found in Leviticus, Chapter 18, verse 22: "Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is an abomination." The same book of the bible, in other words, from which Obama was quoting. Jimmy, you can’t have it both ways.