The obituary page of The Massachusetts Spy
By Luke Reschuss
Obituary Editor
Almost lost in the avalanche of the destruction of American democracy and its replacement by an insane tyranny was the death of one particular prick who provides a vital link between the past glories of the Christian nationalist right and the current triumph of sadistic dictatorship.
We refer to one James Dobson, dead at 89. He hasn’t occupied as much of the national spotlight as he once did, due either to his senescence or the fact that there are so many others in his lane of deranged Christians sadism that he got kinda crowded out, but it’s worth our while not only to celebrate his long-overdue demise but to link it to the current catastrophe.
The writer Talia Lavin '12 summed up his miserable life with admirable concision:
James Dobson is dead, leaving behind the legacy of poisoned politics he created, and countless children and adults who live with the pain of surviving the cruel methods of child rearing—child abuse, in fact—he thrust on the American public. This is a man who boasted in a bestseller about beating his dog, and instructed millions of parents to do likewise with their offspring.
Maybe that’s where Kristi Noem got her ideas about animal cruelty.
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| Christian mom in action |
Further, Lavin makes clear the bright link of barbed wire between the prevailing political universe of white Christian Republican reactionary politics and the sadistic violence against the helpless advocated by Dobson:
In 1970, an obscure child psychologist named James Dobson published a book that would come to spearhead a movement toward biblical parenting. He positioned it as a necessary curative for the permissive, sinful culture that swept through America in the sixties. The book proclaimed its “countercultural” status in the title: Dare to Discipline. Dobson’s vision was undergirded by repulsion at widespread social chaos, and at its core was his solution: the enforced submission of children to absolute authority.
The emergence of evangelicals as an active right-wing political force on the American scene came into full force over the subsequent decade, largely as a backlash to the civil-rights movement and school integration. In tandem, and in ways that are complexly intertwined with an overweening political agenda, a new vision of the domestic sphere arose in popular books, ministries and churches. Raising the specter of student-led activism—the antiwar, civil rights and feminist movements—a new generation of evangelical leaders portrayed strict discipline in the home as a solution to social disorder.
Those who now profess to be shocked at the cruelty and sadism of staunch Republicans and good Christians like Pres VD Amin, Florida Gov. Ron “The tents go up, the tents come down” DeSantis, and their minions and taint-polishers would do well to reflect on how such revolting behavior became part of the Republican and white Christian brand.
Not a day passes when the great hero of Republicans and white Christians who now sits in his gilded throne room in the White House dispenses either threats of, or actual, violence. He always savored inflicting pain on those he deems inferior to him (pretty much everyone except for a tiny handful of billionaires and Vladimir Putin), from his repeated rapes and sexual assaults, to his delight in tormenting his political opponents with threats of jail and baseless criminal investigations, to his asportation of immigrants in the middle of their status determination process to a violent foreign concentration camp, and to his fomenting and wallowing in the violent insurrection on January 6, 2021.
Nor is he alone. Rather he is accompanied by and protected by a veritable Stürmabteilung of sadistic out of control men (and a few loathsome women), including two Supreme Court Justices, his Secretary of Defense, his chief factotum Stephen Miller, and other hangers-on including the “chief of staff” for his clueless but apparently horny immigration enforcer, Kristi Noem.
All to the delight of white men, especially white Southerners, whose lust of violence directed at persons of color has been remarkably consistent over the last 406 years or so:
“For many of our members, President Trump represents the values and energy that have reenergized the Republican Party in recent years, particularly here in Arkansas,” [GOP county chair] Sims said.
Not just Arkansas, but wherever the values of the Confederacy live on today.
But we can't add anything to the vivid description of the horrors of James Dobson and his views to what Ms. Lavin provides.
We dilate on his long-overdue passing to examine not the miserable Dobson but at how he was treated by our beloved mainstream media during his long and notorious career. One would think that his unapologetic advocacy of child abuse and cruelty would have marked him as outside the pale of American society.
One would be wrong.
Let's start with his obituary in that high-speed automatic sanewashing and -waxing machine, The New York Times:
Guess they couldn't fit the child abuse bit in the headline or subhed. So we'll keep going:
In an era of change that revolutionized concepts of family life, child-rearing, marriage and sexual identity, Dr. Dobson was for countless conservative Americans a rockbound beacon of resistance who denounced the “wickedness” of abortion and same-sex marriage, and who advised parents how to communicate better with each other and how to educate and discipline their children.
That's communicate in the sense that Donald Trump communicated with E. Jean Carroll in the dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman by raping her.
The closest the Times gets to revealing the horrible reality of Dobson is buried and, as is SOP with the Times, drenched in critics-say:
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| When you lose the baseball bat |
In 1970, he published a child-rearing manual, “Dare to Discipline,” that advocated corporal punishment in moderation to curb disruptive behavior....He was also denounced by women’s organizations; gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender groups; and other activists who said he had made a career of vitriolic attacks on homosexuality and abortion rights. Social scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists accused him of misrepresenting their research to support his religious ideology and political agenda.
The poor man was just beset by critics including the usual fringe suspects, like women, Lesbians, and weirdo social scientists! Will they ever stop bitching? And what's so bad about child abuse “in moderation,” anyhoo?
Also buried in the obit was Dobson's long and warm political relationship with mainstream Republicans like St. Ronald of Bitburg and Bush Minor. Karl Rove persuaded the latter to take time off from lying us into war into Iraq to tape a fulsome (in the original sense of the word) tribute to Dobson back in 2002:
Those who are hurting and helpless, like the children beaten by their parents who are told by Dobson that such sadism is actually a mission from God? How much do they owe James Dobson? Probably as much as their older brothers and sisters, sent to death or disability in a pointless war in Iraq, owe Bush Minor.
Dobson, despite his advocacy of child abuse, was regarded as an important enough thinker to merit his own Times op-ed piece, basically threatening any Republican who evidenced a lack of enthusiasm for sticking their arms up women's uteruses to impose the hateful metaphysics of the Christian dominationist right on women who might not want Dobson and his ilk to control their bodies:
Yeah, values. That's what it was about, according to The New York Times.
He was also regarded as an authority about crap he knew nothing about, like stem-cell research, and worthy enough to lie about it as a guest on CBS News's long-time Republican tongue-bath, Face the Nation.
Why should we care? Maybe if the media had not whitewashed batsh*t-crazy Christian-fundamentalist sadists as devoted protectors of the “traditional family,” we might not today be so quick to regard today's demented sadists as advocates for children's health, crime fighters, or protectors from the supposed ills of undocumented immigrants. We might actually have regarded these evil lunatics as an intolerable enemy to be exposed and fought.
But our media masters tell us that calling these bent hatemongers what they are would be taking sides.
Yes it would: it would be the side of objective truth.
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