{"id":572,"date":"2003-08-29T11:06:13","date_gmt":"2003-08-29T16:06:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/572.html"},"modified":"2003-08-29T11:06:13","modified_gmt":"2003-08-29T16:06:13","slug":"james-dobson-and-the-religious-rights-embrace-of-victimhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/james-dobson-and-the-religious-rights-embrace-of-victimhood\/","title":{"rendered":"James Dobson and the religious right’s embrace of ‘victimhood’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument may have been moved from its spot in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building, but Moore’s minions are still hard at work. In addition to filing a laughably frivolous lawsuit<\/a>, theocrats gathered in Montgomery yesterday for their biggest pro-Moore rally to date<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While the event featured many predictable speeches from the usual suspects, I was caught off-guard by some of the remarks offered by James Dobson, head of a religious right group called Focus on the Family.<\/p>\n

For those unfamiliar with Dobson, he is a “Christian psychologist” and radio broadcaster with a sizable religious right empire, which he runs from a campus in Colorado Springs. While he lacks the ministerial credentials and national notoriety of allies such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, Dobson is cut from the same cloth.<\/p>\n

While Dobson generally focuses his hatred on gays, he has several targets. A few years ago, for example, Dobson began railing against the Girl Scouts, blasting the famous cookie sellers for becoming proponents of “humanism and radical feminism.” He’s also strangely paranoid about mysterious enemies conspiring against fundamentalist Christians.<\/p>\n

“The forces arrayed against the family are almost irresistible,” Dobson wrote<\/a> in 2001. “Homosexual activists, radical feminists, abortion zealots and haters of Christianity have banded together to bring down the old order and substitute their own version of the Brave New World.”<\/p>\n

In any event, Dobson has decided that Roy Moore’s crusade is the newest worthy cause to rally behind. His remarks at yesterday’s rally were, however, disconcerting, to say the least.
\n
\n“It’s not about the Ten Commandments,” Dobson said. “It’s not even about that wonderful man Roy Moore. It’s about everything else. It is mostly about the unelected, unaccountable, arrogant, imperious judiciary that is determined to shove its wishes down our throats.”<\/p>\n

I get that Dobson doesn’t care much for the federal judiciary, but his hysterical ranting about the courts shoving its wishes “down our throats” is uniquely insane.<\/p>\n

Dobson, however, wasn’t done. In an apparent attempt to try and make my head explode, Dobson told the story of Rosa Parks and said it was “very, very ironic” that the Moore fight was occurring in Montgomery.<\/p>\n

“We’re in a great moral struggle of our own,” Dobson said<\/a>. He added, “It can be said that people of faith are being sent to the back of the bus, and we’re not going to go there.”<\/p>\n

This lunatic has a lot of nerve. For Dobson to rely on Rosa Parks’ heroism before a crowd of neo-confederate southerners<\/a> is genuinely nauseating.<\/p>\n

But it’s also pathetic to see Dobson — and the religious right in general — embrace a self-pitying sense of victimhood. Dobson thinks fundamentalists are being sent to the back of the bus the way African American were throughout the South because the law won’t let the state promote one religion’s sacred text. The man has obviously lost touch with reality.<\/p>\n

Can Dobson seriously believe that the plight of African Americans suffering under Jim Crow laws in the South — where they were segregated, denied the right to vote, denied equal access to public and private facilities, and subjected routinely to police brutality — is in any way analogous to theocrats being told they can’t have state-sponsored religion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments monument may have been moved from its spot in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building, but Moore’s minions are still hard at work. In addition to filing a laughably frivolous lawsuit, theocrats gathered in Montgomery yesterday for their biggest pro-Moore rally to date. While the event featured many predictable speeches […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}