James Dobson’s Worst Nightmare Part 2
A history of James Dobson, his political movement, how his purity culture was pedophile culture, and how he supported Putin's rise to power in Russia.
Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity.
TW: eugenics, racism, forced sterilization, gendered violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse materials, and homophobia/conversion therapy.
This episode, DL gives an overview Dobson’s far-reaching political career, including his international influence, how his purity culture protected pedophiles, and more.
TRANSCRIPT
James Dobson's Worst Nightmare Part 2
DL: I'm not really James Dobson. I'm DL Mayfield. And I'm James Dobson's worst nightmare. Welcome to part two of our series called…
Krispin: James Dobson's Worst Nightmare.
DL: That's me. That's you. That's Krispin. That's anybody who has any degree of familiarity with their own will and their true selves. So if you're listening, that's you. You found your way to us. Welcome.
Krispin: That's our stubborn dog, Fern, the Corgi.
DL: Oh, our Corgi is very strong-willed!
Krispin: She's definitely James Dobson's worst nightmare.
DL: Actually, my nephew was over yesterday and was like, Fern would actually love Trump. And I was like, that's true, our dog does love everyone. But also has a strong will, so Trump would not like our dog.
Krispin: Oh, uh-huh. Haha.
Anyways, welcome to part two. I am assuming you listened to part one where we talked about the ideological roots of James Dobson and his parenting and marriage empire. Today we're getting into the nitty gritties of his political involvement, which, you gotta buckle up because it's all over the map and his…
Krispin: So, yeah, I feel like we should start with trigger warnings.
DL: No. People know what they're getting in for. No, I'm just kidding. You go for it. What do you want, what do you think the trigger warnings say?
Krispin: Well, obviously like anti-queer ideology, politics, et cetera. We're going to be talking about child porn, child sexual abuse materials, child sexual exploitation, probably corporal punishment.
DL: Yeah. And, and I want to say really quick that the point of this two part series is, I mean, to be honest, it's just for, for me to get it out of my head. Obviously we've been writing about a lot of these things. Some of this information is going to be in future chapters that we're working on right now.
But really it's just to have a resource for people are like, I know Dobson was a bad guy, but how do I tell people? Send him to this podcast! You know what I mean?
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: We’re doing this as a resource. I am just being my full self, which means you're going to hear a lot of research and then I'm gonna be a total little shit sometimes.
Anyhoo, that's what this is about. And I don't want to overwhelm people with this information. I actually think knowledge is power. And I think being fully informed of the forces that are at play, both in, possibly your own childhood development, but also in America's Christian nationalists political movement, I think is really important. I actually think it can motivate people, I think it can enrage us, and it can actually fortify us to keep doing what we need to do to resist authoritarianism. So, I think it's encouraging. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I mean, we all know I'm a weirdo, but you know what I mean?
Krispin: Yes. Right. Yeah.
DL: That's the vibe. Okay? Are you ready?
Krispin: Yeah. We said this in the last episode, but so many people just have a framework of Dobson through books or Brio Magazine, or Adventures in Odyssey, and don't really know all the ways that Dobson was working politicly behind the scenes, in part because he kept so much of that quiet and we are going to make sure that it is not kept quiet.
DL: Exactly. So part one, we actually talked just so much about the eugenics beginnings of Dobson, and it's really important to point out that he didn't come up with the idea for Focus on the Family, which is the organization he started that he's most well known for.
He didn't come up with that in his own. He was actually modeling it after Paul Popenoe's American Institute for Family Relations, which was explicitly started as a positive eugenics movement and program to help white women be in servitude to white men, have their babies, and raise them. Now, Dobson came on as sort of like the disciplinarian expert.
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
DL: And then after working for with Popenoe for 10 years, when he retired, Dobson started his own org. So I think that's just really important because today we're getting into the Focus on the Family of it all.
Krispin: Right.
DL: And that's what we're doing. So if you were raised evangelical, you heard of Focus on the Family. Right?
Krispin: Yes. Mm-hmm.
DL: I think what people don't know is that Focus on the Family also has a global presence, obviously through their radio programs, which I believe were heard in 163 countries around the world. But also because Dobson wanted global influence. And he did things in America, he saw that it worked and then he outsourced that to other countries.
Krispin: I forgot about the Russia connection! It just came back to me.
DL: We're gonna talk about Russia. We're gonna talk about Putin. We're gonna talk about Uganda. We're gonna talk about Kenya. It's all there. But to start, I think it's important that it's not just me, DL Mayfield, that thinks Dobson is one of the most influential people in American history. The New York Times called him the most influential evangelical in America, right? And this is because of his political lobbying against gay people and abortion.
So those are like what the mainstream media, at least like in the past two decades, have been calling Dobson – the most influential evangelical. Now the evangelicals have taken over, right? Literally as we are recording this, a Wheaton College graduate is basically holding our entire country hostage because he wants his budget passed.
Russell Voight is an evangelical who worships at the p***s of Dobson. You know what I mean?
Krispin: Mm-hmm!
DL: So Dobson starts Focus on the Family in 1977. He turned it into this multimedia empire. He didn't want to just publish books. He knew that radio was really important. That's why I find it so fascinating that he, even though he was born and raised in Louisiana, he spent most of his life in California and then moved to Colorado. But he kind of kept that accent going. Do you have any thoughts why?
Krispin: Right. Well, for one, I think we think of middle America as evangelical. We also know that there are large portions of California that are conservative, et cetera. But yeah, I think it just is that like cultural cachet. And, I think what you are getting at, is that he wants to come across as low key, I don't know what the best word is, like colloquial, sort of just a common sense guy. Just a humble common sense guy.
Yep. And I think that's really important. He became most well-known for his radio programs. And he's just like, [DL imitates a soft-spoken southern man] “Hi, I'm Dr. Dobson, I'm here to talk to you about how to raise your children God's way.”
Krispin: Right. It is offensive to compare him to Garrison Keeler…
DL: Why? I think I don't even like that guy. You don’t even know Garrison Keeler!
Krispin: I actually don’t. No, I don’t. But I feel like it's that same…
DL: Folksy.
Krispin: Right.
DL: And so you can say a lot of shit if you come across as mild mannered, right? And that is just what a lot of evangelical male pastors did. And I think they modeled it a lot after Dobson's, like, I'm a nice patriarchal bigot, right? And so that's kind of how he got famous.
Now, the thing I've been sort of obsessed with for the past few months is something that I don't know if people are going to follow me on this rabbit trail, but it's really important. I'll say that we've had to read so many Dr. Dobson books and there's, like, weird shit in them, right?
Mm-hmm.
And some of it has to do around children and sexualizing children. Romanticizing the father-daughter relationship. There's just weird stuff that keeps happening. And I have been troubled by this for the past two years. There's been certain things that have happened where I've slowly, against my will, had to become more aware of how serial child predators operate.
And some of Dobson's materials, I'm like, some of these seem like dog whistles to child predators, if I'm being honest. So in doing all that research, I had to sort of become an expert in this time in Dobson's life when he served on the presidential commission on pornography.
So, Dobson's relationship with presidents starts with Jimmy Carter. Dobson had a very lofty view of himself, and he believed that the presidents should listen to him. And Jimmy Carter snubbed him. Didn't invite him to be a part of…
Krispin: Some federal family conference.
DL: Yeah. A conference on families. And so Dobson got Focus on the Family listeners, he urged them to write to President Carter. He got 80,000 people to write in and demand that Dobson should be invited. And he was.
Krispin: And this was all, this is not like an online petition where things are getting shared through Facebook groups.
DL: Nope.
Krispin: This is old school.
DL: Mailing list and radio.
Krispin: And just thinking about that, people had to write a letter, get a stamp, put it in their mailbox.
DL: 80,000
Krispin: Right.
DL: So Dobson was like, Oh my God, am I God? And that started his whole thing. So then he was always like chasing after that sort of prestige in that way. But he never ran for office because he thought he would be stymied, he would be pigeonholed. And he liked actually pulling the strings for many, many, many Republican elected officials and, as we'll see, hundreds and hundreds of policies.
So he never wanted to run for office, but he was obsessed with being seen as a power player for multiple presidents. So when Reagan was elected, kind of with some pressure about just sort of like computers were starting to be around, and you know, people were really worried about child pornography as they should be. So he started this commission on pornography in 1985, and James Dobson was one of 11 people asked to be a commissioner.
So for a whole year he was a part of this commission. He had to travel around the country. He had to hear like, I would almost say hundreds of expert testimonies and witnesses about the harms, or whatever, of pornography, but it mostly focused on the harms. And so much of it was about child sexual exploitation, how that's connected to child pornography, all this stuff.
The only reason I got interested in this is because Dobson talked about it constantly. He referenced being on this commission constantly. He bragged about it. He boasted about it. He felt so important. So finally I was like, ugh, I have to read this report, which is like 400 pages long. And that's the edited document, right?
Krispin: Yeah. And it wasn't – tell me about how you had to access this.
Well, there's – okay, so you're going to hear about some weird research stuff that I got into. So the 400 page synopsis of this year is available to anyone. You can download it. But I started to notice, the commission kind of would reference various testimonies, various expert witnesses.
And I was starting to realize, wow, they seem to have talked to a lot of people who were experts on pedophiles and serial child predators and getting information about, how do these people operate? What are they like? This is not just about pornography, it's about this whole issue, serial child predators.
But I couldn't access those transcripts. We actually have a STRONGWILLED reader and listener, Elizabeth Gonzalez, who went to the National Archives for me and took pictures. I had to look through hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pages of testimony that has not been digitized to prove that Dobson was made aware dozens and dozens of times of the dangers facing children.
Right. And do you want to sum up what I found? Who's the most likely to harm children in the United States?
Krispin: Right. Yeah. It's, uh, you, it's men established in a community, often – I don't know if that's that research, I'm thinking about when you interviewed RL Stollar, it fits those same statistics.
Yeah.
Krispin: Tends to be fathers or stepfather. Tends to be Christians?
Yeah, they mentioned that a few times, but they never said that is the profile, someone who's religious, but we now know it is, right?
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, but they did say it. I mean, there were expert witnesses that said, it could likely be the man in your local church. It's not a guy in a trench coat.
DL: Nope. Not a guy in a trench coat. That was like the most common thing these experts said, because in 1985, we were at this age where we were finally starting to grapple with how untrue stranger danger was. And you know, that's what most of these, like FBI agents were saying, it's not the man in a trench coat, right? It's a pillar of the community. It's a coach, it's a priest, it's a pastor, it's a business person with lots of connections. And they use those connections to abuse children over and over and over again.
So I have proof that Dobson heard all this. He heard it a ton. And then what I find really chilling is he then went back to focus on the family and did the exact opposite. He promoted stranger danger whenever he could. And in fact, he targeted Satanic Panic. He targeted Dungeons and Dragons.,
Krispin: Castles and Cauldrons.
DL: Castles and Cauldrons.
Krispin: For those who know.
DL: He targeted queer people and then eventually trans people, as being the ones who are most likely to prey on children. And that's just not true. Now you can read part of my research on this. We have two parts up as of this recording on how purity culture is actually pedophile culture. In it I tell the story of Dobson's best buddy on this Meese Commission on pornography, who was this Catholic priest named Father Bruce Ritter.
Krispin: I think you should talk about who he was in his community.
DL: Yeah. So Father Bruce Ritter basically fits this role of a serial child predator. He was a Catholic priest who started this house for homeless boys in New York City in Times Square. All these prominent New York business people were on the board of this Covenant House. He was on the Meese Commission.
He was being interviewed by the Washington Post and the New York, New York Times along with Dobson. They were the two that were saying, you must criminalize all pornography, because it's all bad and it will lead men to do horrible things if they look at it, plus it normalizes homosexuality, which they both hated. And because he was so upfront in this culture war as a religious person, suddenly some of his victims started speaking up. And so it turns out that there were so many people, young men in his houses, that accused him of sexually abusing them,
Plus he embezzled tons of money, all this stuff. And Dobson knew about that too! This was his buddy. It came out the year after this commission that the pedophile that they kept being warned about was one of these religious men.
And so, again, Dobson could have used that to actually help protect children.
Krispin: Right. To educate communities about, here are the red flags. I really like what one of the experts said was something to the effect of, yeah, there are obviously people that want to invest in children and that's great, but also people that exploit children are drawn to that and we need to be aware of that and we need to create accountability. And Dobson totally did not do anything that would create accountability for men that would try to exploit children.
DL: Yeah. He never once shared the information with his wide audience about how to be aware that there are predators hiding within churches, hiding within places of power. But instead, he did the exact opposite. He continued to teach people that you need to discipline your kids in such a way that they always obey Christian male authority. And again, you can read our chapter called A Recipe for Abuse, where we talk about how that sets children up for being abused.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: I find it just so insidious, and as we talk about as well, this is two years after this all happened with Father Bruce Ritter, with him being informed about pedophiles on the Meese Commission, he actually helped create this radio program for children called Adventures in Odyssey, which centered around…?
Krispin: Mr. Whitaker.
DL: Mr. Whitaker, who has a lot of these red flags for a serial child predator.
We're not going to get into all that today. You can read our piece on that and we will talk about that in a later episode, but I just have to throw that out there. Anything you want to say about that?
Krispin: Yeah, no, I think that this, in in the eighties, I think is so important. I'm so glad that you've gone back and looked at, what was it that Dobson actually heard? And I think that really frames how we understand what he writes about and says in the future what he omits. Because I think it's just so clear that he had this really important information, and we don't know why, but he definitely did not use it to protect children.
DL: Yeah. And I think that actually this issue of pornography, which – do I want to talk about pornography? No. Are there issues to talk about when it comes to pornography? Yes. But I think the reason that Dobson was obsessed with this issue is because, I believe, it was a cover. It was a smokescreen. It was a way to view himself as a morally upright person, when in actuality he was doing all these things that created children and families where, people were actually more susceptible to serial abusers.
And many of the materials that he published through Focus on the Family read as dog whistles to, at best, authoritarians, at worst, pedophiles. So that's what I'm saying with all that.
Krispin: Right. And if you're like, what do you mean? We'll get into that later. We'll explain all of that. But yeah, I think that's really important. And what he said, what he and Ritter said, was that if you start with soft core pornography, you eventually get to these extremes of abusing children. Which the research currently does not support, the research then did not support.
DL: Yeah, so the commission, including the four women on the commission, did not agree with Ritter and Dobson who wanted to criminalize all pornography. They're like, what? That doesn't make any sense. We should criminalize pornography that hurts people and all, you know, child pornography, of course. So I think we have to keep talking about this just for a tiny bit, just because Dobson was so obsessed with it.
Some of the other things are, Dobson scored the last interview with serial killer Ted Bundy in 1989. And in it, he got Ted Bundy to confess that the reason he killed women was because he was addicted to pornography. And Dobson videotaped this chat, this deathbed confession, and then sold it through Focus on the Family for $25 a pop.
Krispin: Which back then was like $60 in today's money, by the way. That's not a small amount.
Right. And Focus on the Family, let me be clear, is a nonprofit. Tax free.
Krispin: Right.
DL: So he is literally profiting off of this. So gleeful. And then anybody who's an expert, anybody who even knew Ted Bunny was like, he's a serial liar. And he looked gleeful as he was being like, yes, this is why I did it. You know, it's wild to me. But then Dobson used that experience to continue to fundraise, to continue to get money for his organization and to promote his belief that pornography makes people violent and that it's progressive.
Krispin: Makes people kill other people. Oh my god.
DL: Makes people kill other people. These are the two things. It makes people kill other people, and it makes people sexually abuse children. So I'm just being clear, that's what he said.
And there's just so much here. Here's another rabbit hole. Bill Hybels, you know, founder of Willow Creek, he wrote a book called, okay, what is it called? Christians in a Sex Crazed Culture. And in it – this is just indicative of the rot at the core of evangelicalism. Now, Bill Hybels eventually resigned from Willow Creek because he had been accused by multiple women, his staffers, for being sexually harassed, groped, and being forced to watch pornography with him.
Now, in this book he wrote in the eighties, right? When did he publish it? Oh, 1989. Same year Dobson was talking to Ted Bundy. He says Dobson came to him, they were having lunch, and he was asking Dobson about the Meese Commission was like, what's the big deal? What's all the drama with the, with pornography?
And Dobson was like. It's a big deal because it's changed. And so Dobson was like, are you going be talking about pornography at your church? And Hybels was like, yeah, I think so. And then Dobson said, well, you better prepare. You better prepare. And Hybels was like, what do you mean? And so Dobson said, you better research it.
This is what Dobson said. Well, this is what Hybels says. Hybels says. “He, [Dobson] looked me right in the eye and said, get yourself educated young man, firsthand. Get educated and then just do as God leads from that point on.”
So Bill Hybel writes, “So I did, and I have to confess with a certain amount of embarrassment that when I began my study, a little voice told me that this might even be interesting. After all, I'm as red blooded as the next guy. But it wasn't interesting. It was disgusting and depressing and filthy. It was shocking and sickening.”
And then he literally talks about…he watched child porn.
Krispin: Mm. Okay.
DL: Okay, so he says, “Next, I had my assistants rent some adult videos. I'm not sure what I was expecting but I saw a steady stream of sexual perversion, including fathers having sex with daughters, sons with mothers, siblings with each other, adults with children, and children with children.”
And so basically, Hybels is admitting to watching this, because Dobson told him to. Now of course, he's couching it in this entire book where he's very anti-it, and it's shocking and disgusting and filthy. But now he has this airtight reason why he has this stuff on his computer. Let's then switch into – Dobson is sort of known as the founder of purity culture around this time. There's a lot of, and you know, you and I have had to read a bunch of these books, so there's lots of these white evangelical men in particular, who were writing books about how to keep your kids sexually pure. You want to talk about LaHaye’s book really quick?
Krispin: Oh my God. Are we talking about the one where he says that fathers are responsible for their daughters being sexually responsive wives?
DL: Yeah. I mean, there's so much going on in these evangelical books from the seventies and eighties that is truly wild.
Krispin: I mean, really it is. So healthy families are like, hey, you're going to develop sexually. We can talk about it. I can support you in having your boundaries around your sexuality. In these books, starting at a very young age, I mean that’s what LaHaye says, you know, show me a girl, five or six, and I will tell you about her, like how she's going to, in the future, respond to her husband sexually. And that is sexualizing a child.
DL: Which is something pedophiles do. Right?
Krispin: Right.
DL: And so that's why we're going with some of our research again, is just saying Dobson, and a lot of these people, they sexualize children and they also treated children as little adults. And that's the hallmark of Dobson's discipline methods is children are sinful…
Krispin: I thought you were going to say hallmark of pedophiles.
DL: Well that too. So pedophiles view children as little adults. And Dobson makes it very clear in all his parenting materials, that is the backbone of his belief, too, is children are sinful, just as sinful as any adult. And you have to parent them with that in mind, or else you won't hit them.
Krispin: Right. And if you are attempted to look at them through a developmental lens, he's like, no, they are defying you. They are trying to take your authority away. They know what they're doing. They know what their behavior means. Rather than being like, yeah, a child is a child and they don't always know what they're communicating, you know, that sort of thing.
DL: Yeah. I mean, Dobson said this, the most important contribution Sigmund Freud made to his profession was that children are sexual beings. They're not asexual and it starts in the crib. And so for us, as we've been reading these books, there's these three things that really stand out. The sexualization of children, viewing them as sinful and adults, and then romanticizing the father-daughter relationship. And these three things are just like candy for serial child predators.
Now, there's a few other things too. I don't know when it all started, but in Dare to Discipline, that Dobson wrote in 1970, he writes – I don't know how old his, his daughter Dene was at this time – but he says when she turns 10, I intend to have a ceremony with her. This is in his chapter on discipline and morality, and sexual immorality. He's like, I plan to give her a necklace with a key on it, you know, so she’ll pledge her virtue and purity until she finds the one man. And, and in later additions, he says, I did that when she was 10, gave her this key necklace, she pledged, her virginity and all this creepy shit.
And then he is like, and you can buy these same necklaces at Focus on the Family! You know, again, it's the grift. It's the grift. But I don't know if there's an example before 1970 of a dad giving his young daughter a piece of jewelry meant to signify her virginity that she pledges to God and to him until she gets married, you know?
Krispin: Right.
I don't know. I haven't found it. So anybody listening, if you find an earlier example of this happening in American evangelicalism, let me know. I do think Dobson was the first. And if you grew up in this world, you know about True Love Waits, you know about getting these purity rings. And Focus on the Family was so into all that stuff. Dobson was so into this purity culture. Right?
Krispin: Right. Mm-hmm. Whether he started it or not, he really got it off the ground.
DL: Yeah. So the guy who eventually ended up starting purity balls, which if people don't know, that's where they take this sort of ring and jewelry thing to the next level and hold this ball where the young girls dress up in white and go with their dads. And it's kind of like a marriage ceremony. It is fodder for pedophiles. I'm not saying everyone is.
Krispin: Right.
DL: I'm just saying that is what pedophiles dream of and fantasize about. So whatever you think of that, that's just the reality for some people. Do you want to hear what the official pledge is for the purity balls?
Krispin: Yes.
DL: By the way, the guy who started the purity balls, that's what I was getting to. He worked at Focus on the Family.
Krispin: Okay.
DL: He left Focus on the Family to start the purity ball movement, which was based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So it all comes back to Dobson, the purity balls. Current speaker of the house, Mike Johnson participated in a purity ball, which the American media doesn't give a shit about, but Germany is all over it.
Krispin: Uh-huh! Uh-huh!
DL: And they're like, this is the creepiest thing we've ever seen. Okay, here's the pledge. Pledge is:
“I, (somebody's father, you have to say your daughter's name) choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband, and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.”
I'm not focusing on what the young girls say, but I'm just saying, this is just so disturbing. And so like a patriarchal wet dream. At best. Right. And at worst is what I already said.
Krispin: Right. And recognizing that fathers sexually abusing daughters is way more common than society would like to believe.
DL: I mean, that's some of the things that Dobson was told in the Meese commission by an FBI, detective named, um, Kenneth Lanning. And he actually has written so many books on this, but in the 1980s, and he told them this, he said, the most common form of child sexual abuse is father daughter incest. That's the number one.
And in fact, most social workers, detectives, that's what they think of when they think of child sexual abuse. That's how prevalent it was. As we made the case, Sigmund Freud also found this out, right? And yeah, do you want to talk a tiny bit about that?
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Right. So basically, Freud was working with a lot of women that had mental illness, in hospitals.
DL: Yeah. “Hysteria.”
Krispin: So he was talking with them and he found this pattern that so many of them, the majority of them, nearly all of them, reported being sexually abused by, most often a father, or another patriarchal figure. So, like, an uncle, their father's friend or, yeah. And so he actually wrote a paper about it, but then what are the implications for society, if all these men are abusing their daughters?
DL: Powerful men.
Krispin: Yes. Right, and this implicated the powerful ruling class as well as the middle class. And so where he went with that was, he was like, well, it must not be true. It must be fantasies that these women have.
DL: They have sexual fantasies for their dads, is what he said.
Krispin: Right, exactly. Which is unfortunately, like, the basis of psychoanalytic great theory, which is the basis of psychology and therapy. So, that's just another example of how common it is. And when we start to face it, when we start to look at the reality of that reality, most often societies are like, that can't be true, we need to not focus on that, or come up with an excuse or a reason.
DL: Yeah. And I think Dobson and Focus on the Family have been a huge part in shifting the conversation away from, we need to have these conversations about incest, about interfamilial sexual violence, about a community member’s sexual violence. And he totally erased that from the narrative.
Krispin: Right. And the point I was going to make is what happens when the person who is most likely to sexually abuse others is given the ultimate divine ordained power? Who holds them accountable? Right.
DL: Nobody. Yeah.
Krispin: If the father is the high priest of the house. And I mean, then, then we're getting into a patriarchal marriage, where women are not allowed to – they have to submit to the authority of their husbands. It really fails to protect kids.
DL: Oh my God. Okay. Well, we're done with the pedophile part now. Just keep that in mind for everything else. Now we have to sort of – I don't even know how to do this. I don't know how to do this, Krispin, to talk about how Dobson switched from focusing mostly on parenting, discipline, marriage and family advice, which he continued to do.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: But there’s, in my mind, there's two phases to Dobson's life. There's that phase where he's telling people how to discipline their kids in such a way they will obey authority. Then he starts his political activism.
Krispin: Which, this thought just occurred to me. You can really see that shift.
DL: Yeah?
Krispin: If you've read his books from the 2000s or 2010s, he's phoning it in, his energy is elsewhere. Because he’ll do a whole chapter of, here's a letter that a woman sent me thanking me for the way that she raised her boys.
DL: He's a busy man, Krispin, he's a busy man.
Krispin: Or it's just rambling stories. It's like he sat down and just talked for 12 hours and then put it into a book.
DL: Yeah. I mean, he has said, especially in the beginning because of the positive eugenics influence, they're trying to change culture that way. And eventually he realized, and a lot of other conservative men realized, you have to go through the political apparatus. You have to go through the courts.
So they set their sights on the Supreme Courts. They set their sights on sort of flooding the zone when it came to bills, and they decided to set their sights on abortion after Roe v. Wade happened, and they started to realize, oh wow, this is an issue that Christians really care about. Would you like to guess what Dobson's view on abortion was pre 1973? Now remember, he was working for a eugenics at the time who loved forced sterilization. So, do you have any guesses on what he thought about abortion?
Krispin: Yeah, I mean my guess is, if we're bringing the eugenics into it, if there are going to be birth defects or other undesirable characteristics, that abortion is his advice.
DL: I mean, all I could find, and again, I haven't done too much research into this, basically in a forward for a book – just listen to this title. The book is called Sex is a Parent Affair. I don't know. Dobson said that the Bible was silent on the subject and that some interpretations of Exodus 21 could suggest that a fetus was not regarded as a full human being. And so he was like, I'm neutral.
However, we do know that if you are for sterilization, you're probably pro-abortion for non-white populations and for non-able-bodied people. So I just find this another example of him being so two-faced. He erased his entire relationship with Popenoe and the eugenicist movement, and later on in his career made this big show about calling Planned Parenthood a eugenics place.
Does that make sense? And it just infuriates me.
Krispin: Uh-huh. Right. Oh my God.
DL: Krispin! So that's annoying. So that's just one thing that he started to get involved in. But we have to talk about these organizations that he started, and there's too many to talk about. So I'm trying to conceptualize, how do I talk about this? How do I talk about this?
But the first one that he started after Focus on the Family was the Family Research Council, which he helped found in 1981. So the Family Research Council was basically like, we have to start to do things lobbying at the federal level for – basically they focus on anti-gay stuff.
Right? Because that was starting to pick up some steam. Um,
Krispin: You mean anti-gay legislation?
DL: What did I say?
Krispin: You said anti-gay stuff, which makes it sound like you're against gay stuff.
DL: Well, he was, yes, that's true.
Krispin: Not gay people, but like gay stuff, like doing gay stuff, which is true. He was against doing gay stuff.
DL: I'm telling you what, I don't even know how to talk about this. But basically the Family Research Council was like, we're going to put out a lot of books and we're going to write academic papers to support anti-LGBT views, which then we can pass into laws. So this Family Research Council, they write all these model legislations, and then they created a family policy alliance that helps work with individual states to get these bills onto the floor, to get voted on and to get passed into legislation.
Krispin: When you say model legislation, you mean like something where it's sort of like, here's the legislation and then on a local level, people can fill in the blanks and use it?
DL: Yeah. So here's a modern example of, again, they've been doing this since 1981, and you know, there's actually a few places you can Google, that are trying to do the work of showing every single bill they've been involved in. But I've yet to find one that actually shows every single one. But here's an example of a more recent one.
So the Family Research Council proposed this legislation, they wrote it, called the Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act, the SAFE Act, which is about not providing gender affirming care to trans youth. They wrote that and then 34 states introduced a bill with that language modeling that bill they wrote in the the legislative season from 2021 to 2022. So that's just one example. Right.
Krispin: Yeah. They just like, they write it, their lawyers do all of that work and then they distribute it and then people adapt it to their local state.
DL: Yeah. So in the eighties and nineties, they were really focused on trying to get gay marriage from being legalized. And in recent years, they've really gone hard after transgender youth in particular. And here's something that's really interesting. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that roughly eight in 10 Americans believed that there's some discrimination against transgender people in American society.
And the survey also found that most Americans favor laws to protect trans people. But the survey also gave a clue why conservative Christians and Republicans have focused on high school athletes in many bills, because it said that about six in ten Americans favor requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth.
So this is just to show how intense this Family Research Council is. They are looking at what the statistics are saying and then they found there's this weak point, right? Where people are most likely to feel weird about trans athletes, which is why that's what they focus on, that they started doing all these bills about that.
Krispin: Right. Which is why it's become the national conversation.
DL: And that's what I think people don't know. This is Dobson's doing. He started the Family Research Council. He started it. And they're the ones promoting the trans athlete panic because it was the weak link in people caring about human rights for a minority population.
So I'm starting to get so intense about it, but that's one example. Think about how many things they've been involved in. So the thing about the Family Research Council is that that's just the big nationwide one. Dobson then helped start them in basically 48 of the 50 states. If you're listening to this right now and you live in the United States, you can look up your state's Family Research Policy Council. They will probably boast about all the bills they are putting forth, all the ones they've won. And they're all going to be anti LGBTQ.
And now anti-abortion because that's now happening again. So I just think people have no clue that Dobson is behind so much of this stuff. Do you want me to keep going?
Krispin: Yes.
The next big group – so those are the two big ones. Family Research Council, and then the family research policies for each state. I guess it's called the Family Policy Alliance. One more thing to say about those Family Policy Alliances. Here's another example of what happened in 2021. The Idaho Family Policy Center did not exist as an organization. But then less than a year later, it became an organization and it helped draft and push three of the biggest and most controversial pieces of legislation.
During the 2022 session, there was a bill banning most abortions in Idaho by allowing for civil lawsuits against medical providers, a bill making it a felony to provide gender care to a minor, and a bill holding librarians criminally accountable for children accessing obscene materials.
Krispin: Whoa. Mm-hmm
DL: I mean. That's one state, right? Think about what these places are doing in your state, what they have already accomplished, and that is due to Dobson.
So then in 1994, they really focused on, we have to go to the Supreme Court. We need, first of all, we need to work to stack the Supreme Court in our favor. We need to challenge it. So six conservative men, one of whom was Dobson., they founded the Alliance Defending Freedom. This group advocates for the criminalization of homosexuality in the US and abroad. And at this point, they claim to have been involved in 47 legal victories at the Supreme Court.
And they claim to have over 3000 affiliated attorneys across the country. So this is the legal defense fund that Dobson has raised millions and millions of dollars for, and promotes. They're the famous ones that helped the baker won't bake a cake for a gay couple thing, you know?
Krispin: Yeah.
DL: It's hard to express how much damage the ADF has done. So remember the A DF, remember these organizations, um. Those are three big ones. I have asked people to help me research this because again, there's no one article you can go to in order to see every single piece of legislation that has been touched by Dr. James Dobson.
Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
DL: But there's hundreds and hundreds of them. You can look into that. He's also been a part of so many of the different organizations that are on the board of Project 2025. I also had people help me create a document with that. We can link in the show notes. It's so overwhelming the amount of places he either helped start, he helped fund, they helped fund him. And they're getting what they want right now. And, again, Dobson is at the core of it.
Anything else you want to say before I move on?
Krispin: No, I think that, I think for me that was– I feel like Baptist News Global as in article at one point saying, hey, all these, uh, anti-trans bills, they’re not just spontaneously—
DL: Coming out of nowhere.
Krispin: Right. Yeah.
DL: It’s like a cut and paste format, honestly. And they're winning. So we mentioned briefly, Dobson isn't just involved in shaping American politics, but he is also involved in shaping it globally. And so there's this really interesting article that I found talking about Dobson's global influence and, this is by these Russian academics who are looking at, how did this language of family values and a culture war help elect Putin. Which kind of ended any democratic future in Russia right? In the eighties and nineties.
And so, it talks about how the first contact between Russia and Focus on the Family goes back to the late 1980s. And it is talking about the Russian academic community reached out to James Dobson, was like, can you come and teach us about these culture war tactics you've used to get people elected into power? And he was like, sure. And so basically he served as a consultant to these academics and to eventually Putin's team.
And was like, just go full bore on the family values. Make queer people the scapegoat, make outsiders the scapegoat, you know? That got Putin elected and the rest is history, unfortunately.
Krispin: Wow. Yeah. And I am certain nobody – not nobody, now a lot of people know – but who knew that Dobson was part of Putin getting elected?
I mean, are we surprised?
Krispin: No.
The religious right I think is often like, I bet there's up to some something nefarious over there, but I'm like, yeah, you can trace it to Dobson. There's also, there was this article that came out actually just a few months ago in The Republic and it's called How Defending African Values Masks a New Colonization. And it talks about how those three groups, I just told you, that Dobson started, they've been really important in both Uganda and Kenya for helping, again, these culture war values.
And they claim their African values to be anti-LGBTQ plus. Then they get these far right people elected in these countries. And we know, Focus on the Family is involved in this, the Heritage Foundation, but it's also, they named these three organizations that Dobson started. So I, I just think these things are everywhere.
It's a playbook. It's a playbook at this point to amassing cultural power and to getting authoritarians elected. And guess what? Once they're elected, do they leave?
Krispin: The pattern is no.
DL: The pattern is no, unless we make them. So let's keep that in mind too, y'all. Obviously Dobson has been involved in the attack on trans people. What other things? He has ties to Blackwater and Betsy DeVos. I mean, there's too many conspiracies to go down.
Krispin: Right.
DL: And I can't do that. But again, I want to just reiterate, all of these things that he runs are nonprofits. All of them are non-taxed. He also served on a tax advisory council for Reagan, by the way.
Krispin: Right. So, wait. Pause there for a minute. What you're saying is that someone with their doctorate in psychology, and who focused on pediatrics was a consultant on tax code?
DL: Yeah. And then all of his hate-filled organizations that have changed the course of American politics and ruined my childhood were tax free thanks to his work with Reagan.
Krispin: I often think about how Focus on the Family is located in Colorado Springs but I think it is currently classified as a church so it doesn't pay any taxes.
DL: Yeah. Oh, they are a church. Krispin. They meet once a week to pray and sing songs to their despicable little God.
Krispin: And in the last 10 years or so, at one point Colorado Springs shut down its parks and lights because they didn't have enough public funding. While Focus on the Family was located there, funneling millions of dollars through their organization that did not – I mean, I come from a small town that was nationally known for, between raising taxes or shutting down the library, they chose to shut down the library.
DL: Good old Roseburg!
Krispin: Right. And I feel like Colorado Springs has those same sort of political leanings. So it's not a surprise, but it's just wild.
DL: Yeah. And in the very last part of his career, he left Focus on the Family. He stepped down because he was getting too political even for that. And then that's when he started focusing on all these other groups and he started James Dobson’s Family Talk. So he continued to have influence, but even Focus on the Family was like…
Krispin: Well, I don’t know if it was…I think it was that, but I think it was also that he was limited…
DL: In what he could do.
Krispin: In what he could do because of what nonprofits are allowed to do and not allowed to do,
DL: But they've gotten away with so much. I find that to be a flimsy argument. Also I think he was a, a horrible person and so people were maybe ready for him to move on. But I'm just going to rapid fire a few quick last things to keep in mind about James Dobson being the worst.
He was very anti- climate change, and very anti- talking about humans having any responsibility in climate change. So let's keep that in mind as we're living through climate catastrophe right now.
Dobson was a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which I don't know if listeners are aware, but in 1997, Dobson got really upset because he heard that the NIV version of the Bible was going to include some gender neutral language.
So Dobson called a meeting at Focus on the Family and got all these influential men, and he was like, we can't have this happen. And so that's when the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was started. That's when they started this committee to require Bible translations to use male default language.
And then they like helped promote the ESV, which when I was going to Bible college, that was the thing everybody was reading. Dobson started that too.
Krispin: And for people that don't know, the ESV was specifically translated with a bias to uphold patriarchy.
DL: Male supremacy. Yes. Um, so that came out of that, we haven't even talked about this, but Focus on the Family established an ex-gay program called Love Won Out in 1988. So it's conversion therapy. Dobson has a long history of being obsessed with conversion therapy which actually started out as autistic conversion therapy. Dobson took those principles and actually met with the founder of it and used those for gay people. Both are horrible. Obviously conversion therapy of any kind is horrible. And Dobson was a huge proponent of bringing that to United States and making it popular.
So, I don't know. I'm kind of at my end of my rant today. There's so much more to say. If I got anything wrong or if you think I got it wrong, you can try researching. If there's any autistics out there who want to help me, you can email me at strongwilledproject@gmail.com.Right? Is that the email?
Krispin: Yep!
DL: And I can give you some tasks! Because I would like to continue to work towards getting some sort of article or some sort of resource where we amass all of the political lobbying efforts Dobson has been behind, just so that people can see what he's involved in.
Now I want to end it with this question.
Krispin: Okay.
DL: I'm going to ask you and then I'm going to answer it myself. Do you think Dobson was an evil genius? Some sort of mastermind? Like, what do you think is going on here with all of this information that I just vomited out here, which you've heard me talk about obviously for the past three years. What do you think?
Krispin: I really don't know. I mean, I tend to think that he's relentless. I also think that there's this element of like, when people start with a level of privilege and power, like he did, right? He got to this point where he had a big audience. And once you have a big audience, you can convert that into lots of different power, even if you're not very smart or like, not very like strategic. You know, there's just like the blunt force of it.
DL: Yeah. Yeah. I think he was relentless. I think he was abused by both of his parents. I think that he doesn't appear to be – he’s not a good writer, I'll tell you that. But yeah, he never stopped. He just never ever stopped. Which I think is interesting. There are just a lot of authoritarians who are like that. They will not stop unless they are stopped.
So I think that's what I want to keep in mind. I don't think he was a genius. I think he was strategic. I think he was very invested in the white supremacist patriarchy and he never let go of that. And I think he's kind of the story of the last century in America, because he had a two-pronged approach and one was abusing children so that they were more susceptible to embrace and accept authoritarian rule, and then he went about implementing authoritarian rule through his policies and through his political activism.
So I think that's a big deal. I think it's a big story. I don't want to give him too much, like, intellectual credit. But that's why I wanted to make this series. That's why I've been obsessed with Dobson, is because he deserves this look as an influential person. And he influenced us on a personal level and on a political level.
And I'm here to be his worst nightmare by telling the truth about him, his ideology, and just how much harm he has done. And he's never been held accountable for it. I mean, he died a month ago. And boy, howdie, were the praise is rolling in, you know?
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: So I just think we do what we can. Going back to how we were parented, the best thing we can do is try to get in touch with and reclaim that strong will that was beaten and shamed out of us, and continue to be in touch with that as we have to live in the world that Dobson created. And it's not a world I want for my kids. It's not a world I want for my neighbors. It's not a world I want for me. I want a world that is actually a democracy. Right? Wouldn't that be cool?
He obviously hated it. And again, his authoritarianism comes out even in his approach to, to politics. I will write these policies, you all just implement them. We can change people because they're gullible, they're sheep, you find their weak points and you pressure that, and you just flood the zone with endless radio programs, endless books, you know?
And I'm like, sure, he won in some ways. And yet there's people like us, there's people who listen to our podcast, he didn't get us all. And there's actually so many Americans who are waking up to this reality of having been played by these men who were hypocrites, possibly pedophiles, but who truly abused people left and right and did not care.
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: And I guess that's how I want to end it, is if you care about children, if you care about children flourishing, if you care about children being protected from serial predators, if you care about children not being bullied for their gender expression or sexuality or race, this is our time to stand up to the bullies in our life who listen to Dobson and agreed with him.
It could be your parents, it could be your faith community, it could be Facebook friends, could be people on your local city council. They're coming for us all. And if we don't stand up to them in whatever ways we can, because not everybody can do everything, they won't be stopped. So I don't know. That's how I want to end this. Do you have anything to say, Krispin?
Krispin: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And, yeah, I don't even know how to make sense of Dobson’s legacy. But it really sucks where we're at right now, and I also do have hope that we're going to shift things and work towards equal human rights for everyone. Because that really is the core.
DL: That's just the core of it. All we want is equal rights for human dignity.
Krispin: I was going to say that's the core of what Dobson fought against.
DL: I know. It really was. And if you're having trouble with your evangelical parents, that's probably the core of it. They probably don't actually view all humans as being worthy of dignity and food and safety. So I don't really know how you overcome that gap, but I do believe in those things. And actually that is what is at the core of my strong will is my belief in human rights for all. And my belief in democracy. And Dobson found that so dangerous he had to write an entire book telling parents how to beat and punish their child who had access to that strong will. So that's the best defense we have, right?
Krispin: Yep.
DL: Is to keep developing that. Get in touch with your autonomy. Do not obey in advance. Right?
Krispin: Mm-hmm.
DL: That goes without saying. And thanks for listening to this. If you found it helpful at all, please share it. Please share it on social media. You can support our work financially. You can support our work emotionally, you know, by commenting or reaching out. If you support us on Patreon, you get access to our really cool Discord plus some fun bonus podcast features. Yeah, thanks for being here. Thanks for letting me present my – what is this?
Krispin: Thank you for, I mean this is years of work and research and connecting with people, so also thanks to all the folks that have helped us in this research.
DL: Yes.
Krispin: And when I say us, I really mean you. You have just like put so much energy and effort into this and I'm really grateful for that.
DL: Aw, thanks. Thanks to everyone who's helped me with my little research parts. And I don’t know, this is a community led project. This is survivor led. It's for survivors of these religious authoritarian parenting methods and unfortunately, I'm like, is all of America now a survivor of religious authoritarian parenting methods? You know?
Krispin: Feels like it.
DL: Well, so we're going to keep going. We're going to keep doing our thing. Thanks for your support, and I guess we'll catch you on the next episode. Yeah, we will be back soon and we will be digging a little bit deeper into some of the stuff that we covered briefly in this. So be on the lookout for that. We're not exactly sure when that's coming, but it is coming. And in the meantime, we really appreciate your support and for listening. Bye!
DL: Thank you, bye!