ANOTHER GOP FAT WHITE GUY

James Dobson was on Larry King yesterday. Here are some excerpts:


KING: We discussed this before in the past, but not recently: Do you still believe that being gay is a choice rather than a given?

DOBSON: I never did believe that.

KING: Oh, you don't believe it.

DOBSON: I don't believe that. Neither do I believe it's genetic. I said that...

KING: Then what is it?

DOBSON: I said that on your program one time and both of us got a lot of mail for it. I don't blame homosexuals for being angry when people say they've made a choice to be gay because they don't.

It usually comes out of very, very early childhood, and this is very controversial, but this is what I believe and many other people believe, that is has to do with an identity crisis that occurs to early to remember it, where a boy is born with an attachment to his mother and she is everything to him for about 18 months, and between 18 months and five years, he needs to detach from her and to reattach to his father.

It's a very important developmental task and if his dad is gone or abusive or disinterested or maybe there's just not a good fit there. What's he going to do? He remains bonded to his mother and...

KING: Is that clinically true or is that theory?

DOBSON: No, it's clinically true, but it's controversial. What homosexual activists, especially, would like everybody to believe is that it is genetic, that they don't have any choice. If it were genetic, Larry -- and before we went on this show, you and I were talking about twin studies -- if it were genetic, identical twins would all have it. Identical twins, if you have a homosexuality in one twin, it would be there in the other.

KING: Right.

DOBSON: So, it can't be simply genetic. I do believe that there are temperaments that individuals are born with that make them more vulnerable and maybe more likely to move in that direction, but it usually is related to a sexual identity crisis.

Dobson is correct to assert that it's not simply genetic but he should point out that the concordance rate for identical twins is higher than the rate for schizophrenia and that suuggests a very strong genetic component.

Dobson then bangs the drum of libel one more time:

DOBSON: That's very possible. We're all inclined to look at other people. But it's interesting to me that those, again, on the more liberal end of the spectrum are often those who have no value system or at least they say there is no moral and immoral, there is no right or wrong. It's moral relativism.

KING: To you...

DOBSON: Let me finish the point. That's moral relativism. So they say there is no right and wrong. But when a religious leader, especially an evangelical falls, guess who is the most judgmental of him and calling him a hypocrite and those things? Those that said there is no right and wrong in the first place.

The truth of the matter is there is right and wrong and we all, within our midst, have failures and they do occur.


I still want to know who these liberal moral relativists are. Anyway, here is Dobson on the concept "just war":

KING: Does the Iraq war bother you?

DOBSON: It does not -- well, of course, it's a horrible experience. People are dying.

KING: I mean, is it a mistake?

DOBSON: I don't believe it was a mistake.


Dobson on the separation of powers:

KING: On reflection though, were you politically wrong on Schiavo?

DOBSON: Absolutely not.

KING: Not politically?

DOBSON: Not politically or morally wrong. I believe that the position that many, many people took -- and there were a lot of them -- who felt that Terri Schiavo was being deprived of life and liberty -- she was handicapped, she was damaged, but since when do we kill people who have a handicap? Where do you start...

KING: Do you believe it was OK for Congress to get involved?

DOBSON: I think they should have done that. They took a moral stance. They took a courageous stance.

On his buddy Fats:

KING: You mentioned stem cell. Do you believe that Mr. Limbaugh hurt your cause greatly with that ridiculous tirade about stem cells, which might have affected the Missouri election?

DOBSON: Well, you call it ridiculous. I don't think it was. I was listening the day that he made those...

[snip]

KING: But do you think it affected the election in Missouri?

DOBSON: I think that it helped close the gap, because we were behind a whole lot more. We wound up just losing that by I think it was one percent.

KING: You think it helped.

DOBSON: I think it helped, because people began to understand. Cloning was involved. Rush said day after day after day it was not just stem cells, it's cloning, and that's what the point was.


I've shown below that cloning isn't involved but the facts don't matter to Dobson.


Dobson as Constitutional scholar:


KING: We have a separation of church and state.

DOBSON: Who says?

KING: You don't believe in separation of church and state?

DOBSON: Not the way you mean it. The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. No, it's not. That is not in the Constitution. That was...

KING: It's in the Bill of Rights.

DOBSON: It's not in the Bill of Rights. It's not anywhere in a foundational document. The only place where the so-called "wall of separation" was mentioned was in a letter written by Jefferson to a friend. That's the only place. It has been picked up and made to be something it was never intended to be.

What it has become is that the government is protected from the church, instead of the other way around, which is that church was designed to be protected from the government.

Dobson on the Golden Age:

DOBSON: ... And I really would rather the world would be a little more like it was when my dad was young, where you knew pretty much where people stood on the great moral issues. And today you've got to get in and fight for them, and that is not easy.