The Creation of a Zealot

The Carpetbagger Report:

Have you ever wondered why Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family is such a nutcase? Why is he so obsessed with the sex lives of people he doesn't even know? Why does he hate gay people so much? Why does he claim to love Jesus so much, and then behave in a vicious manner so unlike Christ?

A recent profile of Dobson sheds some light on these questions. As it turns out, Dobson's parents physically and mentally abused him as a child, and he once got beaten up in school by a kid even Dobson admits was widely acknowledged to be a "sissy."

The article in a Denver magazine called "5280" makes Dobson's mother, Myrtle, sound like a real piece of work. Notes writer Eileen Welsome:

Myrtle Dobson was an amiable and social woman, but she didn't hesitate to whack her son with a shoe or belt when she felt it was required. Consequently, Dobson writes, he learned at an early age to stay out of striking distance when he back-talked to his mother. One day he made the mistake of mouthing off when she was only four feet away and heard a 16-pound girdle whistling through the air. "The intended blow caught me across the chest, followed by a multitude of straps and buckles wrapping themselves around my midsection." The girdle incident did not dampen his defiance, however. One evening, after Dobson's mother forbid him from going to a dance, the recalcitrant teenager told her that he was going anyway; she picked up the telephone and called her husband. "I need you," she said.

The article continues: "'What happened in the next few days shocked me down to my toes,' writes Dobson."

Years ago, on The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson, Carson had a long discussion with a Harvard Ph.D. who recounted a horrific childhood that included abuse, mutilation, and the compoundment of the man's various physical ailments. Their discussion focused on how he "made it" when so many in less horrific but similar circumstances ended up in prison. So Dobson had a tough childhood; well, welcome to the damn club. While his difficulties may explain his behavior, that does not excuse the behavior. No excuse will suffice for the inhumane positions that Dobson has espoused. Dobson and his kind would well to quit thumping the Bible so much and actually try reading it.