[extropy-chat] James Dobson, Smarmaster General

[Al Brooks]

Dobson's Focus On The Family:
1,300 Employees
55,000 outgoing letter replies per week
6,000 facilities carry Dobson's weekly broadcasts
2.3 million subscribe to at least one of Focus On The Family magazines
1,500 Focus On The Family therapists
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The Moral Majority has long been gone, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are very old men, and James Dobson is the King of Smarm in America. Ironically, his mentor at the Los Angeles based American Institute Of Family Relations four decades ago, Paul Popenoe, was a secular humanist and eugenics advocate. Popenoe co-authored 'Applied Eugenics' in 1918, advocating "good breeding" and the sterilization of retarded and mentally ill patients at California hospitals. After Nazi medical atrocities became known at the end of WWII, public interest in eugenics declined and Popenoe moved on to what are now called 'family values' . Neo-Victorian child-rearing became more attractive to Popenoe as society gradually became less traditional-family- oriented in postwar America, though Popenoe was never himself religious. Thus Popenoe became surrounded by very religious men such as James Dobson. Dobson moved FOTF to Colorado from California in the early '80s, but refused to take sides in the election of
 '92, saying he wouldn't marry a politician for fear of becoming a political "widow" for four years. In this decade Dobson helped get president George W. Bush elected and re-elected, but at a price to Republicans, Dobson demands Republicans fight stem cell research,  abortion,  gay marriage, obscenity, and last but not at all least, secularism. Most of all, Dobson desires the appointment of  Supreme Court Justices who will toe the Religious Right's line. Dobson, holding a PhD in psychology, is no minister or politician-- yet he helps orchestrate a religiously-oriented political movement of unsurpassed power, a movement that in more liberal times might have been called reactionary but is today merely considered 'conservative'. 
You will be hearing more about Dobson in the years to come.
 
 
 
 
 
 







		
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