News Intelligence Analysis
[Editor's Note: emphasis added by the Yurica Report.]
From Rocky Mountain News
James Dobson Is Happy With Bush's Nominee John G. Roberts
Dobson keeps focus on the fight
Champion of Christian right
sets his sights, political clout on battle over courts
By M.E. Sprengelmeyer, Rocky Mountain News
July 23, 2005
James Dobson isn't afraid to dish out tough love.
Listen closely. Don't sass back. Or else . . .
"When a youngster tries this kind of stiff-necked rebellion, you had better take it out of him," he once wrote, "and pain is a marvelous purifier."
The 69-year-old psychologist penned those words 35 years ago.
Standing up for "judicious" spanking launched him as a pop-psychology phenomenon - a counterpoint to the kinder, gentler parenting gurus of the day.
Back then, Dobson prompted parents to restore the country's moral underpinnings one rambunctious child at a time. Today, he translates his tough talk into politics.
Down-to-earth advice for Christian families is still Dobson's main occupation. But over three decades, the founder of Colorado Springs-based Focus on the Family has evolved into one of the most formidable political forces around.
He is known for his stern warnings, aimed not only at liberal foes, but also at nervous members of his own conservative family.
The message: live up to promises made to values-minded voters, or there will be swift discipline at the polls.
Dobson laid down the law after last year's election. He and other evangelical Christian leaders helped President Bush and Republicans score decisive victories. For that, they demanded results.
Fight abortion. Block gay marriage. Stop stem cell research. Get tougher on obscenity. Keep God in the public square. And above all else, Dobson said, deliver new U.S. Supreme Court justices who will defend all of that in the courts.
If Republicans don't deliver, Dobson told one interviewer, then "they'll pay a price."
The chance to reshape the nation's courts represents Dobson's greatest hope after 35 years of battling what he sees as society's moral and cultural decline.
Dobson was happy with Bush's nomination of federal Appeals Court Judge John G. Roberts on Tuesday to replace retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Now he'll jump into the fray by asking his millions of faithful listeners to hold senators' feet to the fire during the confirmation.
Dobson's words carry enormous weight. He is not a minister. He is not a politician. Yet today, he leads a grassroots-organizing machine as potent as any in politics.
Critics say he's too powerful. Too strident. Too harsh with those who don't toe his line. Defenders say he's just standing up for millions of values-minded folks who expect politicians to live up to their words.
As longtime ally Gary Bauer puts it: "I think Jim, as a pro-family leader, feels an obligation to make sure that the people who listen to him are not being exploited or played for suckers."
An early call for discipline
In the beginning, there was a frog.
Dobson was unknown nationally in 1970, when he opened his book Dare to Discipline with a parable about a little green critter swimming in a pot of water.
The frog is oblivious as the temperature increases gradually, slowly getting hotter and hotter until it boils him alive.
That's the way Dobson saw American society at the end of the 1960s, mindlessly wallowing in a counter-culture cesspool. "We have passively accepted a slowly deteriorating 'youth scene' without uttering a croak of protest," he wrote.
With that, Dobson began croaking against permissive parenting, against the drug culture, against promiscuity in the name of "sexual freedom," against couples living together out of wedlock, against those who claimed "God is dead." He argued for "judicious" use of corporal punishment. He mentioned that when he used to sass back, his mother would punish him with a "handy belt," a shoe or, in one case, a girdle with a metal buckle.
Critics scoffed at the blunt message, but the book was on its way to selling several million copies.
Shortly after Dare to Discipline was published, it won a place of honor inside a glass case at the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, one of the earliest groups formed to study and support families.
Dobson worked there as counselor and assistant director, joining about the time he finished his doctoral degree in 1967 at the University of Southern California.
The institute's founder, the late Paul Popenoe, wrote the foreword to Dare to Discipline. With only an honorary doctorate, "Dr." Popenoe was one of the first pop-culture marriage counselors, the "Dr. Phil" of his day.1
The pairing with Dobson still astounds Popenoe's son, David, since his father was a secular humanist who began his eclectic career advocating a philosophy that Dobson would denounce later: eugenics.
In 1918, Popenoe and longtime associate Roswell Johnson wrote the textbook, Applied Eugenics, which stressed better breeding as a way to improve society's stock. Popenoe advocated sterilizing mentally ill and mentally retarded patients in California hospitals.
Considered "progressive" in its day, eugenics fell sharply out of favor after World War II, when its "social hygiene" premise became associated with the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Popenoe never disavowed eugenics, his son said. Instead, his interests evolved: from better breeding, to better families, to saving marriages.
Though not religious, Popenoe laced his later work with strict Victorian values. "As the secular world turned against marriage and family, in his last years he found himself more or less surrounded by nothing but religious people," David Popenoe said.
That's where Dobson came in.
"We're a completely secular family and always have been," David Popenoe said. "How shocked I was that Dobson would become one of my father's legacies."
Dobson finds his focus
The year 1977 was one of the biggest in Dobson's life.
In a small office in Arcadia, Calif., he launched the tax-exempt group that would become a powerhouse during the next three decades: Focus on the Family. Dobson began using a regular radio program and videotaped lessons to advance the reach of his classroom seminars on parenting.
Something else happened to Dobson that year. He lost his father.
The Rev. James Clayton Dobson Sr. had a profound influence on his only son's life and early writings.
He was a traveling evangelist during his son's childhood. At one service, the 3-year-old Jimmy Dobson had his religious awakening. "I recall crying and asking Jesus to forgive my sins," Dobson later wrote.
Father and son forged a bond when hunting, fishing and playing tennis. "There was a closeness and a oneness that made me want to be like that man . . . that made me choose his values as my values, his dreams as my dreams, his God as my God," Dobson wrote.
The father counseled his son on the abortion issue when he was studying at the USC School of Medicine in the 1960s, according to an account published in the Focus on the Family publication, Citizen magazine.
Dobson said his father got tears in his eyes saying, "No, no, no, Jimmy. I could never put a politician in office who would do this to an unborn child."
According to the magazine, it was about that time when the younger Dobson was counseling a woman who was considering having an abortion. Dobson said he tried to talk her out of it, but then he agreed to drive her to the hospital.
"Oh, how I regret that," Dobson said. "That was the first, last and only time I ever facilitated that type of tragedy."
That incident and his father's words cemented Dobson's views against abortion and inspired many of his later political efforts, including trying to overturn the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision, Roe vs. Wade.
Focus on the Family had little to do with public policy until Dobson realized the grass-roots influence he could harness with his radio audience.
In 1980, President Carter convened a White House Conference on Families, and Dobson wanted to be involved. At his urging, 80,000 radio listeners reportedly persuaded organizers to give him a seat.
The event in Baltimore was plagued by infighting between conservatives and liberals, starting when a divorced woman was named executive director. Delegates clashed over abortion and gay rights, and couldn't even agree on the definition of "family." Though widely considered a flop, the conference galvanized religious conservatives who started organizations aimed at influencing public policy.
Dobson left with an idea to found a second organization, the Family Research Council, to "drive the national debate on family issues."
"I was just really beginning to key in on the national scene and what was going on in public policy," he said in a 1998 speech.
Dobson's public role grew under President Reagan. He served on panels examining juvenile delinquency, family-friendly tax reforms and other issues.
Attorney General Ed Meese's commission on pornography in 1985 and 1986 put Dobson in the spotlight.
Members of the commission spared no detail in describing the things that convinced them of the need for stepped-up enforcement of national obscenity laws. In a report, Dobson wrote vivid descriptions of violent sex acts, bestiality, pedophilia and homosexuality.
"At an age when elementary school children should be reading Tom Sawyer and viewing traditional entertainment in the spirit of Walt Disney, they are learning perverted facts, which neither their minds nor bodies are equipped to handle," Dobson wrote.
Critics panned the commission report as an attack on free speech. They dismissed Dobson as someone stuck in the 1950s. He poked fun at the caricature in the 1998 speech.
"I don't want to go back to the days of Ozzie and Harriet. That's simply not true," he said. "I want to go back to the days of Mayberry, with Sheriff Taylor and Opie and all of those good folks. Don't you just love it when Barney Fife says, 'My whole body is a weapon.' "
Though often written off as a prude, Dobson has never been shy about discussing sexual issues. In a book aimed at Christian teens, Preparing for Adolescence, he described masturbation as "not much of an issue with God." The book also includes other advice: "Homosexuality is an abnormal desire that reflects deep problems, but it doesn't happen very often and it's not likely to happen to you."
Influence on video
In the 1980s, Dobson still was little known outside Christian circles. The Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority made far more noise. But Dobson was quietly picking up allies inside the U.S. Capitol.
It started with a Focus on the Family videotape, Where's Dad? There's nothing political about the program. It's just an emotional lesson urging fathers to spend time with their children, like a Harry Chapin song set to pictures.
In 1982, it hit home for U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., a father of five who had just been elected to Congress.
"It was a life-changing film," Wolf said in an interview.
Wolf stopped working on Sundays. He got a separate phone line at his office for his wife and children, and he started inviting all newly elected members of Congress to watch the video.
One early convert was a fiery Texas Republican named Tom DeLay.
Now the center of constant controversy as House Majority Leader, DeLay told The Hill newspaper that he was irritated when Wolf first asked him to watch Dobson's video in 1985. But when he did, it was as if "the Lord hit me upside the head with a 2-by-4, because everything bad James Dobson was talking about in that (video) was me," he said.
DeLay isn't alone in crediting Dobson for his spiritual awakening. Having fans scattered across Capitol Hill came in handy when Dobson began marching on Washington to press his values agenda.
By the end of the 1980s, Focus on the Family was no longer a mom and pop organization. It grew to 750 employees in Pomona, Calif., with Dobson's syndicated radio broadcasts reaching 25 countries and publications spreading across the globe.
"It became clearer and clearer to us that it was costing us too much to operate a nonprofit ministry in the Los Angeles area," Focus spokesman Paul Hetrick said.
Focus officials figured they could save $6 million per year in overhead by leaving the state. Colorado Springs made an offer they could not refuse.
In 1990, the city was in the throes of a national recession, dubbed "the foreclosure capital of the world." El Pomar Foundation, created by Broadmoor Hotel founder Spencer Penrose, offered Focus a $4 million grant to buy headquarters land.
"We saw the potential for a lot of new jobs being created, and no downside from what we knew," said Thayer Tutt, El Pomar president and chief investment officer.
Dobson had just settled into Colorado Springs when the 1992 presidential election rolled around. President George H. W. Bush stopped by for a Dobson interview on his way to the Republican National Convention.
In those days, Dobson didn't pick sides. He once told an interviewer: "You marry a politician, you can end up a widow the next four years. I would never do that."
Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton won the election, heralding what conservative lawyer and writer John Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute dubbed the "Fall of the Christian Right."
Falwell already had folded the Moral Majority. The Rev. Pat Robertson tried to keep moral issues alive with the Christian Coalition. The movement, however, might have died completely in the Clinton years if not for Dobson, Whitehead said.
"Without Dobson, you wouldn't have any of the political movement you have today," he said. "Falwell couldn't carry it. Billy Graham couldn't carry it.
"But you have this one person with this immense audience and power."
Dobson kept the fight alive not just by attacking Clinton, whom Whitehead calls "the antithesis of family values," but by sparking a power struggle within the Republican Party.
He started working hand-in-hand with Gary Bauer, a former adviser in the Reagan White House whom Dobson had tapped to head the Family Research Council.
In 1994, they joined other Christian conservatives and rallied supporters for anti-abortion candidates in the mid-term congressional elections. That contributed to a GOP takeover in Congress. Soon, Dobson and Bauer started demanding results.
In early 1995, they denounced GOP leaders for letting New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, a moderate favoring abortion rights, deliver the Republican response to President Clinton's State of the Union Address.
"They seem more comfortable with Democrats who vote against them 100 percent of the time than Republicans who vote with them 98 percent of the time," Whitman said recently.
They pressured congressional leaders to stay focused on family values, and they tried in vain to get 1996 presidential hopefuls such as Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, and the eventual Republican nominee, Sen. Bob Dole, to start stressing moral issues.
Dobson felt that millions of religious conservatives had been rebuffed. He ended up casting a protest vote for his friend Howard Phillips, chairman of The Conservative Caucus. Clinton was re-elected.
Dobson was in an all-out fight with the "big tent" GOP.
Pressuring Republicans
Dobson and Bauer pressed their agenda in a 1998 meeting with GOP Reps. Dick Armey and Tom DeLay. Dobson later described DeLay as "argumentative, defensive and accusatory."
"It doesn't help when you guys keep bashing us," DeLay reportedly said.
Dobson talked of "going nuclear" against Republicans, urging millions of his listeners to stay home or vote for third parties in the 1998 mid-term elections.
He said he refused to be a "good soldier" if the party's pro-family rhetoric was not backed up by action on abortion, school choice and other issues. He warned the GOP about how the Whig Party disintegrated in 1858 after it grew "out of touch with the moral fiber of the nation."
Before the 2000 presidential election, Dobson and Bauer had their own rift.
Bauer left the Family Research Council to mount a short-lived presidential campaign. When it ended, Bauer threw his support to Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a moderate populist.
Though Dobson had not endorsed anyone, he called Bauer's endorsement of McCain "troubling" because McCain gave no guarantees that he would have an anti-abortion running mate and because he already had voted for Supreme Court nominees who supported abortion rights.
Bauer said he got assurances that McCain would not nominate any judges "who thought that unborn children were outside the protections of our constitution."
Still, the allies drifted apart, finally pulling back together before the 2004 election.
"We're both adults," Bauer said. "Husbands and wives overcome disagreements, and friends do, too."
They had extra incentive after the Massachusetts Supreme Court cleared the way for same-sex marriage and courts ordered a Ten Commandments monument to be removed from the Alabama Supreme Court.
So, Dobson discarded his old pledge never to "marry" a politician. He made the decision at a 2003 Ten Commandments rally in Alabama.
"I saw the excitement of the people," Dobson said later. "I saw how they longed for a voice and how frustrated they were by having their views overridden by leftist judges and by the inability of the Congress to get anything done to protect their values."
Dobson endorsed George Bush in his contest with John Kerry, but he didn't stop there. He joined Bauer and other religious conservatives at mass rallies in the U.S. Senate battlegrounds of North Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota.
He geared up the new political committee, Focus on the Family Action, organized hundreds of pastors to register voters and sent 5 million letters, e-mails and postcards to voters in seven states, including Colorado.
"I used to say, if you could harness all the power of half the churches in America, the influence would be amazing," Whitehead said. "Dobson is coming close to doing it."
A means to an end
The role of evangelical Christians in the presidential election gave the national media a compelling story line. Though even Dobson doubts he played a decisive role, it gave him even more leverage to hold Republicans to their promises, particularly on judicial nominations.
He flexed muscle just days after the election, blasting the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, for suggesting he might oppose U.S. Supreme Court nominees who want to overturn abortion rights.
"The people who put President Bush back in the White House and expanded the Republican majority in the Senate weren't voting for a party," Dobson said in a statement. "They were voting for candidates who share their pro-family values."
That attitude sets Dobson apart from other religious conservatives who have remained loyal to the GOP even when they have been disappointed by results, said political scientist John Green of the University of Akron, an expert on religion in politics.
"He's much more issue focused," rather than elections-focused, Green said.
"Dobson sees the Republican Party as a means to an end."
Some Republicans fear the party is being set up for a crash.
Whitman, former New Jersey governor and EPA Administrator, said religious conservatives such as Dobson have exerted influence that goes "far beyond what the numbers justify."
She points to the fight earlier this year over the fate of Florida hospice patient Terri Schiavo. Dobson and others persuaded Congress and President Bush to intervene in a court case, hoping to restore the woman's feeding tube.
"Because of very sophisticated tactics and the ability to reach the opinion-makers and the leaders of the Congress . . . they were able to get Congress to act quickly - faster than they do on almost anything of national importance," Whitman said.
Later, however, polls showed that a large majority of the general public opposed congressional intervention. Whitman said it suggests that the evangelical movement "may be a mile wide but an inch deep."
Green said there's a reason politicians can't take people such as Dobson lightly.
"Names like James Dobson or Pat Robertson become a symbol for a broader group of people who are quite active politically and can bring a lot of pressure to bear on the government in a short period of time," Green said.
How that plays out during the Judge Roberts' Supreme Court confirmation process remains to be seen. This week, Dobson scheduled a nationwide simulcast in August from Nashville to promote Roberts.
In this spring's filibuster fight, Dobson led a "Justice Sunday" simulcast from Louisville, Ky., prompting viewers at churches around the country to call specific senators and demand an up-or-down vote for judicial nominees. That was in addition to targeted newspaper ads and a busy e-mail and letter-writing campaign.
The aggressive tactics angered Sen. Ken Salazar, a Denver Democrat who called Dobson and his group "the Antichrist of the world" - a comment he later retracted. But even Republican Sen. Trent Lott, of Louisiana, reportedly complained about Dobson's "un-Christian tactics." When asked about Dobson recently, Lott snarled: "Is he a Republican?"
Since his earliest days, Dobson has cared about something much bigger than party politics, his old friend Bauer said.
"He doesn't yearn to be in the highest regions of the Republican Party as some sort of player or whatever," Bauer said. "He just is interested in this set of issues and he wants something done about them."
Focus spokesman Hetrick said Dobson will support "politicians of any stripe" who stand up for traditional values.
"His heartfelt desire is to promote a pro-family, pro-life agenda, not to engage in the game of partisan politics," Hetrick said in an e-mail interview.
Hetrick said Dobson has repeatedly told politicians about millions of people who support traditional marriage, oppose abortion and support various conservative causes.
"Obviously," he added, "if our elected leaders fail to take these millions of Americans into account, they can expect to suffer at the polls."
Dr. James Dobson
• Title: Chairman, Focus on the Family
• Birthdate: April 21, 1936
• Education: Ph.D., 1967, University of Southern California, child development
• Employment: Associate clinical professor of pediatrics, USC School of Medicine, 14 years; member of attending staff of Children's Hospital of Los Angeles, 17 years
• Professional: Licensed psychologist in California; licensed marriage, family and child counselor in California and Colorado
• Author: 35 books
• Family: Wife, Shirley, National Day of Prayer Task Force chairwoman; daughter, Danae, and son, Ryan, both speakers and authors
Dobson's growing empire
In more than two decades, Focus on the Family has become an international organization, offering everything from advice to counseling to literature.
1,300 people are employed by Focus on the Family's ministries.
6,000 facilities worldwide carry James Dobson's weekly radio broadcast.
2.3 million people per month receive one or more of 10 magazines produced by the organization.
55,000 letters are answered by Focus employees every week.
1,500 therapists make up the organization's network for professional counseling.
URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/state/article/0,1299,DRMN_21_3948116,00.html
Copyright 2005, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
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