Republican Gomorrah

by Max Blumenthal

  Yet to most of the 250,000 visitors who flock to Focus on the Family every year, and who have made it the second biggest tourist site in Colorado, Dobson is presented as he wishes to be seen: as a reluctant activist utterly uninterested in earthly power or influence. As soon as they are greeted at the gates of the Focus campus by one of several unflaggingly pleasant female tour guides, visitors are presented a portrait of Focus on the Family as a benign, albeit slightly conservative, Christian nonprofit organization that spreads the Gospel along with Dobson’s self-help advice. Any hint of Dobson’s radical-right activism is softened by the tour guides’ programmatic recitation of code phrases about his struggle to save “The Family.”

  To those not initiated into the special language of the group, references to “The Family” might seem as anodyne as the root beer floats served in the mock-1950s malt shop in the basement of Focus on the Family’s “Welcome Center.” To Dobson’s flock, however, the phrase is clearly understood as a reference to the mass movement of right-wing evangelicals that excludes from its ranks all homosexuals, members of minority religions, and liberal and moderate Christians.

  Despite the Stepford-like smiles of the tour guides, members of Dobson’s movement affect an insular, even paranoid worldview. They are a society within a society that peers at outsiders with a mixture of disgust and hostility, fixating on their sinfulness to the point of voyeuristic obsession. When outsiders, collectively referred to by Dobson as “the culture,” dare to pull back the curtain, the Christian right’s self-appointed father figure typically deploys a smokescreen of contrived piety and howls of persecution.

  “What I said is being spun like a top by the ultraliberals who don’t care about human life,” Dobson complained in May 2005, after Jewish groups demanded that he apologize for his on-air comparison of stem cell research to Nazi experiments on live human beings. (“That’s what Francis Schaeffer told us to say,” he muttered in an aside.) Dobson’s response, a fusion of indignation and denial, typified his loathing of scrutiny. What happens in “The Family” must stay in the family—the first of Dobson’s unwritten commandments.

  In the secretive empire of Dobson, the less appealing aspects of Focus on the Family’s Welcome Center are kept hidden from outsiders. Visitors with small children are treated to a tour of the center’s colorful “Adventures in Odyssey” playroom, modeled after Focus on the Family’s popular children’s cartoon of the same name. But they are never told of Dobson’s 1990 memo to the creators of “Odyssey,” ordering them to weave insidious right-wing themes into the show. Since Dobson’s mandate, young viewers have been subjected to episodes warning against abortion (“Pamela Has a Problem”), evolution (“Choices”), and trial lawyers (“A Victim of Circumstance”).

  Visitors are invariably told that the Welcome Center was constructed thanks to donations from “a family in Michigan.” They are not informed, however, that this particular family happens to be the Prince clan.

  Edgar Prince, the family patriarch, was an auto parts magnate who became a born-again evangelical after a heart attack brought him face-to-face with death and aroused his concern with the afterlife. He soon befriended Dobson, who was searching for benefactors, and used his vast fortune to bankroll the expansion of Focus on the Family. Although Prince died in 1995—Dobson gave the eulogy at his funeral—his wife still serves on the board of Focus and vacations with Dobson’s wife, Shirley. The Princes’ son Erik, who served as an intern at Dobson’s organization, is founder and CEO of the controversial international mercenary firm Blackwater, described by journalist Jeremy Scahill as “a politically connected private army that has become the Bush administration’s Praetorian Guard.”

  Taking a cue from Blackwater, Dobson has implemented a vast security apparatus that monitors every move of Focus visitors. Well-concealed security cameras are strategically posted throughout the campus, and heavily armed security guards clad in bulletproof vests lurk around corners, ready to confront what Focus’s website has called “difficult guests.” According to a job application obtained by reporter Cara DeGette in 2006, Focus security guards have collected an arsenal of 2,000 weapons and take target practice at the nearby Air Force Academy.

  On the wall by the campus’s main entrance a bullet still remains lodged, the product of a hostage siege ten years ago, when a disgruntled former employee stormed the office, demanding worker’s compensation that he had been denied. Focus tour guides make a point of explaining that God guided the bullet away from their fellow employees. The symbolism of the magic bullet has acquired almost religious significance as a sign of divine protection. Dobson has made more than his share of enemies in the wilderness of secular society, but so far, he has emerged unscathed.

  At the heart of James Dobson’s ministry is its correspondence department. When visitors are escorted there, however, they are presented with only the briefest description of its inner workings. They are informed that Focus receives so much correspondence it requires its own zip code and told that its streamlined system immediately diverts desperate pleas for help with personal problems to a special counseling section of the department. There, counselors administer twenty-minute “stabilizing” phone sessions before referring needy callers to one of hundreds of Focus-approved therapists across the country.

  But who are these therapists? According to Alexander-Moegerle, before earning their stamp of approval from Dobson, therapists must first pass a litmus test of beliefs that includes the question “Do you, in your practice, condone abortion?” The most prominent of Dobson’s house psychologists was Neil Clark Warren, the avuncular founder of the popular dating website eHarmony.com. Dobson single-handedly propelled Warren’s success, driving business to his private practice while promoting Warren’s books and website on his radio show. One of Dobson’s on-air promotional plugs drove 90,000 new members to eHarmony in one day. “No one has been more helpful for my entire career,” Warren said of Dobson.

  In 2005, however, Warren concluded that Dobson’s radical-right profile was hindering eHarmony’s expansion, and he publicly severed his ties with the Focus founder. Since the split, Warren has nevertheless maintained a Focus-inspired strict policy of rejecting homosexual applicants to his site. In March 2005, a New Jersey man sued Warren under his state’s anti-discrimination law for denying him the chance to seek a relationship with another man on Warren’s site. Warren responded by claiming that matching same-sex couples “is just not a service we offer now based on the research we have conducted.” Warren has never disclosed the findings of this “research.” In November 2008, in order to sidestep the lawsuit, Warren created an independent website, “Compatible Partners,” for gay and lesbian users.

  Those troubled individuals who turn up at Focus on the Family for help with their personal problems fuel Dobson’s industry in another way: The moment their personal data are entered into the computerized Focus database, they are targeted for aggressive fundraising solicitations, most of which are political in nature. Breathless letters are fired off each month to the homes of crisis-wracked Focus members, warning them of the latest threat to the movement, from “the homosexual agenda” to the Christian right’s latest hobgoblin, “radical Islam.” Members are urged to contribute to Focus on the Family Action (Dobson’s political lobbying arm), to vote for anti-gay ballot measures and conservative candidates, and to flood Capitol Hill with calls whenever a piece of “anti-family” legislation hits the floor.

  Dobson’s closed relationship with the media enables him to keep both constituents and critics in the dark about his machinations. He has effectively stonewalled nearly every news organization that has sought to interview him. Only the reliably right-wing Fox News, where Dobson is guaranteed deferential treatment from the likes of self-proclaimed “culture warrior” Bill O’Reilly, is granted regular access to the Focus founder. On those infrequent occasions when an odd reporter from what Dobson likes to call “the secular media” is permitted to enter his inner sanctum, he has usually be
en able to cast himself in the light in which he wishes to be seen.

  This was the case when Newsweek’s Howard Fineman interviewed Dobson in his office in Colorado Springs in May 2005. Fineman was mightily impressed by Dobson’s manner. “It’s that decency and civility that has made Dobson such a force in the country,” he remarked. The grateful reporter continued on about his gracious host, invoking a theme that Dobson has cleverly encouraged throughout his career. Dobson, Fineman concluded, “is plunging headfirst [into politics] after a lifetime of staying away from it.”

  The real Dobson, however, is, as Alexander-Moegerle put it, “a master of clandestine politics.” Unlike Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other lions of the early Christian right, Dobson has no theological credentials. He is a licensed child psychiatrist who has risen to the top of the Christian right through his ability to answer its members’ most intimate concerns. Dobson rarely invokes the Gospel in any explicit fashion, especially when issuing a call to political action. Instead, he exploits the culture of personal crisis that has united his constituents into “The Family.” He is their strict father, the one who helped them repair their marriage after an adulterous affair, treat their child’s bedwetting problem, or “cure” their homosexual tendencies. On election day, Dobson’s flock repays him with political fealty.

  Dobson has carefully encouraged the perception that he is above politics. But in fact, he has been aggressively political since his public career began. The issues that he claims galvanized his activism—abortion and the gay rights movement—were practically irrelevant to Dobson when he first entered the political arena. In the beginning, Dobson was fixated on inducing the submission of unruly children to authority. His draconian methods for ending childhood rebellion form the essence of his philosophy and have helped cultivate the authoritarian sensibility of the radical right-wing movement he commands today.

  CHAPTER 6

  THE KING OF PAIN

  James Dobson was born in 1936 in Shreveport, Louisiana. His father, James “Big Jim” Dobson Sr., was an itinerant preacher who spent much of his time on the road riling up tent revival crowds with fire-and-brimstone sermons. Dobson’s mother, Myrtle, accompanied James Sr. wherever he went, often leaving young Dobson in the care of his great aunt. During her occasional stints at home, Myrtle routinely lashed out at her only son with the wrath of God, battering him for such offenses as spouting the phrase “Dad-ummit!”

  Dobson later reflected on his mother’s child-rearing techniques:

  I learned very early that if I was going to launch a flippant attack on her, I had better be standing at least ten or twelve feet away. This distance was necessary to avoid being hit with whatever she could get in her hands. On one occasion she cracked me with a shoe; at other times she used a handy belt. The day I learned the importance of staying out of reach shines like a neon light in my mind. I made the costly mistake of “sassing” her when I was about four feet away. She wheeled around to grab something with which to hit me, and her hand landed on a girdle. She drew back and swung that abominable garment in my direction, and I can still hear it whistling through the air. The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles, wrapping themselves around my mid-section. She gave me an entire thrashing with one massive blow! From that day forward, I cautiously retreated a few steps before popping off.

  As fearful as he was of his volatile mother, Dobson formed a close bond with his father and emulated his Nazarene Christian faith. Derived from the Calvinist-inspired teachings of John Wesley, the theology to which Nazarene Christians adhere is a doctrine of “Entire Sanctification.” After undergoing a life-changing crisis, they walk the sawdust trail to the altar to become “born again,” thus freeing themselves forever from the shackles of sin and embarking on a straight path to heaven. The strictures of their faith forbid their listening to music, watching movies, or participating in any way in popular culture. Women are not permitted to wear makeup, or even wedding bands, which Nazarenes consider “adornment.”

  Tent revivals serve as a release valve for the Nazarenes’ pent-up passions. Open crying, glossolalia (speaking in tongues), and intensely personal confessions were strongly encouraged at James Sr.’s revivals. Dobson said that at one of his father’s jubilees, he broke town in tears and became “born again.” He was three years old at the time. As Dobson entered adulthood, he adapted the Nazarenes’ emotionalism to his charismatic public speaking style, and although he largely ignored its restrictions against enjoying popular culture, the religion’s concept of crisis and redemption through enforced austerity formed the basis of his hard-right ideology.

  Instead of following his father into the ministry as he was expected to do, the ambitious Dobson enrolled at the graduate school of psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. From there, he entered the USC School of Medicine, where he spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s as a professor of pediatrics. Although his work began to gain some professional notice, Dobson was preoccupied with the tumult outside his window. Sandwiched between Los Angeles’s riot-charred inner city and a college campus roiled by anti-war protests, Dobson seethed and blamed the upheaval on the counterculture and radical politics.

  Dobson flatly rejected the notion that the residual ravages of Jim Crow, the ever-escalating violence of the Vietnam War, or the resentful style of President Richard Nixon had provoked any of these problems. Instead, he homed in on a scapegoat: Dr. Benjamin Spock, a pediatrician whose perennially best-selling book Baby and Child Care advised parents to treat their children respectfully as individuals. To Dobson, the nurturing style of parenting that Spock advocated was dangerous and “off the wall.” “Is it merely coincidental that the generation raised during the [postwar] era has grown up to challenge every form of authority that confronts it?” Dobson asked. “I think not . . . We have sacrificed this generation on the altar of overindulgence, permissiveness, and smother-love.”

  Before Spock, parents were often encouraged to control their children with threats of violent retribution and physical discipline. This mode of child-rearing was particularly prevalent among white Protestants. Prescott Sheldon Bush Jr., the brother of President George H. W. Bush and a patriarch of one of America’s most prominent Republican families, neatly encapsulated the parenting style of his social milieu: “My father was a gentleman and he expected us to be gentlemen,” Bush recalled. “If we acted disrespectfully, if we did not observe the niceties of etiquette, he took us over his knee and whopped us with his belt. He had a strong arm and boy did we feel it.”

  For many new parents of the burgeoning postwar middle class, Spock’s methods seemed a more humane alternative to the stern methods of their own mothers and fathers. What’s more, they worked. Spock’s recommendation that parents pick their children up and comfort them when they cried might seem like conventional wisdom today, but when Baby and Child Care was first published in 1946, it was nothing short of revolutionary. Indeed, Spock’s prescription for kindness incited critics from the start. And when Spock lent his voice to the anti-Vietnam War movement he became a hate figure for the conservative movement. Among the doctor’s most vociferous attackers was Vice President Spiro Agnew, an early and forgotten icon of the New Right who sneered at Spock as “the father of permissiveness.”

  Dobson envisioned himself as Spock’s foil. He pecked away at his typewriter, hoping to produce the definitive child-rearing manual for conservative Americans revolted by the “permissive” passion play of the 1960s. Dobson was convinced that if his teachings reached a wide enough audience, they would forge a new generation of loyal counter-revolutionaries that would return America to the golden days of the 1950s—where boys once again wore pants, girls wore skirts, and, as he wrote, “Farmer John could take his sassy son out to the back forty acres and get his mind straight.”

  Dobson’s manual, Dare to Discipline, read like a manifesto for domestic violence when it finally appeared in 1970. He urged parent
s to beat their young children, preferably with a “neutral object” such as a belt or a rod, lest they turn into drug-addled longhairs. He also advised administering a healthy spanking every now and again. “A little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child,” Dobson wrote. “However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.”

  For parents struggling with children who refused to cooperate in public, Dobson recommended a slightly less vigorous technique than spanking. “There is a muscle, lying snuggly against the base of the neck [and] when firmly squeezed, it sends little messengers to the brain saying, ‘This hurts; avoid recurrence at all costs.’” Dobson instructed his readers to firmly pinch the necks not only of their own sons and daughters, but of the inadequately disciplined children of complete strangers as well. “It can be utilized in countless situations where face-to-face confrontations occur between child and adult,” Dobson said of his technique. To reinforce his advice, Dobson offered an anecdote that read as though it were lifted from the script of Dirty Harry:

  I had come out of a drug store, and there at its entrance was a stooped, elderly man, approximately seventy-five or eighty years of age. Four boys, probably ninth graders, had cornered him and were running circles around him. As I came through the door, one of the boys had just knocked the man’s hat down over his eyes and they were laughing about how silly he looked, leaning on his cane. I stepped in front of the poor fellow and suggested that they find someone else to torment . . . One of the little tormentors ran straight up to my face, and stared defiantly in my eye. He was about half my size, but he obviously felt safe because he was a child. He said, “You just hit me! I’ll sue you for everything you’re worth.” I have rather large hands, and it was obviously the time to use them; I grasped his shoulder muscles on both sides, squeezing firmly. He dropped to the ground, holding his neck. One of his friends said, “I’ll bet you’re a school teacher, aren’t you?” All four of them ran.