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08/25/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

08/21/2025

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Kyle Mantyla

President Donald Trump casually shared Thursday that he would be personally accompanying the thousands of federal officers and National Guard members patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C. later tonight amid the president’s federal takeover of the city.

His toxic teachings on family, sex, and politics left generations scarred—and America worse off.

Formal school-based sex ed in the United States was born of the turn of the century social hygiene movement, a hybrid medical and moral project that hoped to eradicate social ills of the day.

Less than five years after urging rioters to "kill" police at the Capitol, a former Jan. 6 defendant is working as a senior adviser for the Department of Justice, which has been dramatically remade under the second Trump administration.

Veteran conservative radio host Erick Erickson pulled no punches on Wednesday in hammering the Trump administration, particularly Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for suggesting the government take a large share of chip maker Intel.

Laura Loomer has become the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump era.

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/twisted-the-far-rights-disgraceful-reaction-to-the-sandy-hook-massacre/

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DECEMBER 14, 2015

Twisted: The Far-Right’s Disgraceful Reaction To The Sandy Hook Massacre

…his race for Congress, Georgia Republican Jody Hice said the shooting was a consequence of “kicking God out of the public square.” Mike Huckabee blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on…

twisted: The Far-Right’s Disgraceful Reaction To The Sandy Hook Massacre

By Brian Tashman | December 14, 2015

Last month, Donald Trump appeared on “The Alex Jones Show,” where he told the right-wing pundit that he has an “amazing” reputation, unlike other journalists, whom Trump commonly refers to as “scum.” Among Jones’ many wild conspiracy theories is his belief that the massacre at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which took place three years ago today, was “staged” by the Obama administration.

Trump has not faced any criticism from his fellow Republicans for going on Jones’ program or for touting his work, despite the fact that Jones has been instrumental in pushing the harmful Sandy Hook conspiracy theory.

A 2013 Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that “a quarter (25%) of Americans think that facts about the shootings at Sandy Hook elementary last year are being hidden and an additional eleven percent are unsure” and that “Republicans are more likely to think that the truth about Sandy Hook is being suppressed, with 32 percent agreeing.”

Sandy Hook truthers, who largely believe that the attack was faked as part of a government plot to push strict gun laws, are not alone in delivering twisted responses to the mass shooting. Others have used the massacre to attack gay marriage, the separation of church and state and, of course, gun laws.

The Truthers

WorldNetDaily columnist Erik Rush said that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza “positively reeked of what intelligence operatives I know would call the tell-tale signs of recruitment and conditioning,” and wondered if Lanza was the target of a government scheme to recruit “vulnerable individuals for psyops” to advance “their diabolical agenda.”

Renew America’s Austin Miles similarly suggested that the massacre was “purposely orchestrated” to “disarm all Americans to retard resistance,” writing that Lanza and others were “brainwashed into carrying out such deeds that would prove a point about private gun ownership and the threat to all families as a result.” Then, he said, there would be no opposition to Obama using an “Executive Order to declare himself president (dictator) for life.” Fellow Renew America pundit, Laurie Roth, claimed Obama “staged” the attack because he’s on a “mission to take assault weapons from the people.”

Radio host Rick Wiles stated that “Sandy Hook was timed to coincide with the political agenda of the socialist Democrats such as Barry Soetoro [Obama], Chuckie Schumer, and Dianne Feinstein to pass stringent federal gun control laws,” alleging that “the shooting event was timed to coincide with the gun control initiative.” Another conservative radio host, Bradlee Dean, likened the Sandy Hook killings to Adolf Hitler “attacking his own Reichstag to start a world war” and said that it was orchestrated to pass an arms control treaty.

The Tea Party-aligned National Liberty Foundation insisted that the “staged” massacre showed just “how far your president went to get your guns”: “He wants to be a dictator, he doesn’t want to get out of the White House and he loves spending your money.”

Many of their assertions relied heavily on discredited claims that “crisis actors” posed as grieving family members at the school and that one of the young victims later met with President Obama (she didn’t, it was her little sister).

One Republican congressman, Louie Gohmert, however, told a fan of his that he would watch a Sandy Hook conspiracy theory video because he’s “always learning new things.”

religious Right’s Reaction

Several Religious Right activists responded to the Sandy Hook shooting by warning that the massacre was a sign that God is no longer protecting America, removing his hand of protection due to supposed societal ills such as gay marriage, abortion rights and the separation of church and state.

“Millions of people have decided that God doesn’t exist, or he’s irrelevant to me and we have killed 54 million babies and the institution of marriage is right on the verge of a complete redefinition,”Focus on the Family founder James Dobsonlamented. “Believe me, that is going to have consequences too. And a lot of these things are happening around us, and somebody is going to get mad at me for saying what I am about to say right now, but I am going to give you my honest opinion: I think we have turned our back on the Scripture and on God Almighty and I think he has allowed judgment to fall upon us.”

“We’ve taken God our of our school, we’ve taken him out of our government and now we seem shocked at all of these things,” Franklin Graham stated following the attack. “Why are we shocked? We shouldn’t be shocked. This is what happens when a society turns its back on God.” Author Joel Rosenberg said the shooting was one of the tragedies America is “reaping as a result of a society that increasingly ignores God,” specifically blaming comedian Jon Stewart for waging a “war on Christmas” and mocking conservatives.

Before winning his race for Congress, Georgia Republican Jody Hice said the shooting was a consequence of “kicking God out of the public square.”

Mike Huckabee blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on those who have tried to “systematically removed God from our schools,” turning schools into “a place of carnage.” He claimed that school shootings would be a thing of the past if only schools started organizing chapel services for students and the government stopped ordering employers to “provide tax-funded abortion pills.”

One pastor said that a “gracious,” “merciful” and “loving” God decided not to intervene to prevent the shooting because it would “bring us back to our senses” and make people realize that God’s judgment “has really come by our turning away from the Lord.” Bryan Fischer of American Family Radio specifically blamed legal abortion and the lack of state-sponsored prayer for the attack, stating that God is a “gentleman” who “is not going to go where he is not wanted.”...?

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Ted Cruz has proudly boasted of his role in successfully blocking a bipartisan Senate measure to expand background checks on gun purchases following the school shooting, bragging that unlike Republican “squishes,” he stood firm in opposing universal background checks. The Sandy Hook-affected families who supported the efforts, he said, were being used as “political props.”

One of the main organizations that worked with Cruz in fighting the effort, Gun Owners of America, pushed fears that the background checks could lead to gun confiscation, tyranny and genocide. The group’s executive director, Larry Pratt, said liberals “rejoice” following events like Sandy Hook, as they “immediately start shedding their crocodile tears, pushing for more gun control,” and, possibly, martial law.

National Rifle Association board member and musician Ted Nugent blamed the shooting on America’s “politically correct culture” and “‘anything goes’ value system” which “vilifies, condemns and mocks traditional societal values and customs at every opportunity,” while NRA executive director Wayne LaPierre delivered an unhinged speech against gun control measures, lashing out at the group’s critics, the entertainment industry, video games, the media and a lack of guns in schools.

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Instead, Republicans claimed that the government should focus on mental health and then tried to block access to mental health services.

Few if any of the GOP presidential candidates are offering any meaningful gun reform proposals, outside of their unwavering dogma: More guns.

Tags: Alex Jones Bradlee Dean Bryan Fischer Erik Rush Franklin Graham James Dobson Larry Pratt Mike Huckabee Rick Wiles Ted Cruz Ted Nugent Wayne LaPierre gun violence gun violence prevention Second Amendment Gun Owners Association NRA

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but while nearly nine out of 10 Americans, including nine out of 10 gun owners, support more background checks, Republican lawmakers care more about the support they receive from groups like the NRA, and have done next to nothing to tackle the issue of gun violence in the wake of tragedies like Sandy Hook.

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since its formation 29 years ago in 1993, the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has consistently fought against gay rights — often equating anti-gay discrimination with religious freedom. When Kristen Waggoner, legal counsel for ADF, spoke at Yale University on March 10, about 120 students protested her appearance. And in Utah, two well-known Republicans — Sen. Mike Lee and State Attorney General Sean Reyes — have added their names to a letter demanding punishment for Yale students who**protested**the March 10 event.

Salt Lake Tribune reporter Bryan Schott explains, “More than half of the school’s students signed an open letter critical of the decision by the Federalist Society to invite Waggoner to speak and condemned the presence of armed police at the protest. Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken said the protest was ‘unacceptable’ behavior from the students, but they had not violated the school’s free speech policy.”

Co-founded by Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, the ADF (formerly the Alliance Defense Fund) represents a far-right form of White evangelical Christian fundamentalism and is considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

“In addition to Lee and Reyes,” Schott reports, “Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, several U.S. House of Representatives members, five governors, and more than two dozen other state attorneys general also signed on. The letter was drafted by the same group responsible for the Philadelphia Statement, a document that decries the persistence of ‘cancel culture’ in American society. More than 1400 people signed the letter to Yale.”

The letter reads, “Instead of engaging with the panelists, a shocking number of Yale Law students hurled constant insults and obscenities at them.” But according to Schott, “The letter’s depiction of the event is primarily based on an initial report from the conservative Washington Free Beacon. That reporting has been credibly debunked by other publications, multiple videos and the school’s official account of the incident.”

Some of the debunking came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern. On March 18, Stern reported, “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began. Their exercise in free speech, however rowdy or distasteful, did not prevent the panelists from expressing their views. And their demonstration did not — contrary to the Free Beacon’s reporting — require administrators to summon the police.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/trump-evangelicals-2649541067/

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Christian Right is in mourning over President Donald Trump being voted out of office. Pat Robertson, the far-right evangelical who founded the Christian Broadcasting Network, has declared that the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden on January 20, 2021 must be prevented, saying, "We will not give up this great country. And Satan, you cannot have it." But the irony is that the incoming president is much more religious than Trump, who has demonstrated how little he knows about Christianity and the Bible.

Although Trump was raised Presbyterian, religion was never a high priority in his life. But when he ran for president in 2016, Trump realized that the Christian Right was a prominent voting bloc in the GOP and went out of his way to pander to the far-right White evangelicals he had no connection to in the past. The Trump of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s was more of a Blue Dog Democrat than a GOP culture warrior, and he spent a lot more time in casinos than in churches.

Journalist Ed Kilgore, in an article published by New York Magazine on December 17, notes Trump's history of butchering Biblical references during his speeches.

Kilgore explains, "Before Donald Trump became the very favorite politician of White conservative evangelicals, he was regularly a figure of sport for displaying exceptional ignorance in all matters religious. A particularly rich example of his clumsiness occurred when he was campaigning at evangelical stronghold Liberty University early in 2016 and tried to quote a Bible verse that was very familiar to the audience, since it's etched on several buildings there."

Kilgore adds that there were many other "religious gaffes Trump committed while stumping for votes" in 2016.

"On another occasion along the campaign trail," Kilgore recalls, "Trump was asked about his favorite line of scripture. He delivered a word salad for a while and finally tried to recall 'an eye for an eye,' not the sort of thing Christians of any variety consider normative for the faith of the Prince of Peace…... Just prior to the Iowa caucuses, Trump was in a Council Bluffs church when a plate came down the pews with communion bread on it. The billionaire misidentified it as a collection plate and put a couple of bills on it."

Kilgore also notes that in 2017, Trump met with two Presbyterian minsters and was surprised to learn that they didn't consider themselves evangelicals but rather, described themselves as "Mainline Protestants."

Of course, anyone with even a basic knowledge of Christianity realizes that Presbyterians aren't evangelicals any more than Episcopalians or Lutherans — two other examples of Mainline Protestants — are evangelicals. And there's no way that either Biden, a devout Catholic, or former President Barack Obama, a Mainline Protestant, would have made that mistake or confused a communion plate with a collection plate. Unlike Trump, Biden and Obama both have a long history of being churchgoing Christians and obviously have an extensive knowledge of the Bible.

[twt]

if Pat Robertson were to sit down with Biden or Obama, they could have an in-depth conversation about scripture. Yet Robertson, like much of the Christian Right, adores Trump while hating Biden and Obama — which underscores the deeply tribalist nature of the Christian Right.

The Christian Right has long been a hate movement, and it is as much about White nationalism and far-right identity politics as it is about Protestant fundamentalism. The late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr., founder of Liberty University and co-founder of the Moral Majority, was a notorious segregationist during the 1950s and 1960s, when he vigorously defended Jim Crow laws in the pulpit and argued that the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a not a true Christian because of his anti-segregation views. During the 1980s, Falwell defended the racist apartheid regime in South African and encouraged Christians to buy krugerrands to support it.

The late Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, known for being an arch-conservative in his day, was vehemently critical of Falwell and the Christian Right during the 1980s — describing them as dangerous fanatics and warning that the GOP was making a huge mistake by allying itself with that movement. But many Republicans ignored Goldwater, much to the GOP's detriment.

To the Christian Right and far-right White evangelicals, the fact that Biden and Obama are more religious than Trump is irrelevant. Robertson, the Family Research Council's Tony Perkins, James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family) and other evangelical Trump supporters are extreme tribalists, and they view Trump as part of their tribe — which is why Trump got a pass when, according to his former personal attorney Michael Cohen, he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet.

Trump repeatedly attacked Biden as anti-Christian during his 2020 presidential campaign. But in 2017, Trump didn't even know the difference between Presbyterians and evangelicals.

The Christian Right will miss Trump dearly when he leaves off on January 20, 2021. And no matter how much Biden goes to church or accurately quotes the Bible, it won't matter to the far-right evangelical extremists who value White identity politics above all else.

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trumps-religious-right-backers-get-millions-in-covid%e2%80%8b-19-relief/

Conservative evangelical churches and advocacy groups led by vocal boosters of President Donald Trump have received millions of dollars in coronavirus relief funds, marking a new milestone in the religious​ right’s long campaign to take a wrecking ball to the wall separating church and state.

The Paycheck Protection Program included in coronavirus relief legislation was designed to help small businesses and other organizations stay afloat and keep people working during the pandemic. Religious-right leaders worked with​ ​their allies in Congress and the ​Trump administration to make sure that churches would be able to receive direct government funding to support clergy salaries and other operational expenses. The program is administered by the Small Business Administration, which waived normal requirements that participants in its loan program abide by nondiscrimination standards.

On June 22, the SBA hosted a “Recovery & Resilience for Faith Based Communities tele-townhall” for leaders of churches and religious nonprofits to urge them to participate in the program by applying before the June 30 deadline—and to lavish praise on Trump for supporting the program. The call was promoted by the White House and religious-right figures like Gary Bauer.

Paula White, who oversees the Trump administration’s faith-based outreach from her perch at the White House, began the call by praying for the president. “Put a hedge and wall of fire around him that no weapon formed against him would be able to prosper,” White prayed.

White praised Trump and his administration’s extensively, saying​, “it has always been his heart to make sure that houses of worship and people of faith have been protected.” She continued:

You heard that from way back, he was saying, ‘We’re going to put Merry back in Christmas,’ or talking about the Johnson Amendment. But he’s done so much to accomplish that. Things with religious freedom, like removing restrictions on grants. The PPP is one way that we begin to see this. There are so many others, but there are departments everywhere that have grants, and for years and decades, they’ve had restrictions that people of faith have had very, very difficult time. Well, our president made sure to remove those restrictions on grants, ensuring faith-based has equal access to capital, equal access to grant money.

White’s own City of Destiny church got between $150,000 and $350,000 in PPP funds, according to SBA records​.

To overcome the skepticism some conservative Christian leaders might have about getting directly involved with the federal government, officials invited several prominent religious-right leaders to praise the program. While PPP funds could be a lifeline to smaller congregations and nonprofits, it turns out that staying afloat has not been a problem for some megachurches that had online worship and fundraising abilities​. Instead, some of those megachurches have used money freed up by paycheck protection to expand their influence in their local communities.​

Jentezen Franklin, a member of Trump’s Evangelical Advisory Board, is pastor of the multi-campus Free Chapel megachurch, based in Gainesville, Georgia. Franklin was effusive on the SBA call​, marveling that his church received a “tremendous amount of money” within three weeks of applying for it. Data released by the SBA Monday make it clearer how “tremendous” that amount was—in the $1​ million to $2 million range. With payroll covered by government funds and the ability to “catch up online,” Franklin said his church distributed $340,000 to small churches in his community.

Franklin has urged evangelicals to help reelect Trump or​ be prepared to face tragic consequences. Trump publicly announced that he was watching Franklin’s worship service on March 15, which Trump had declared a national day of prayer.

Samuel Rodriguez, a pastor who prayed at Trump’s inauguration and president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said PPP money​ was “like manna in the desert of this pandemic.” Rodiguez said the church was “made for this hour,” adding that “for this administration to recognize the church and the faith community as essential is a game​ changer.”

Rodriguez’s New Season ​Church in Sacramento​, California, received between $150,000 and $350,000. He said the money has helped his own church not just survive but help other churches and expand community outreach. Rodriguez, who recently denounced the Democratic Party as “hostile to our Christian worldview,” ​called the program a “powerful resource” and a “blessing.”

“This is Uncle Sam helping us do the will of our heavenly father,” Rodriguez said. “So the PPP enabled us to cover payroll for our staff that is right now praying for interceding for the needs of our community, not just physical, spiritual, but in mental and emotional needs, literally saving lives.”

Also on the SBA call was another member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family and longtime opponent of reproductive choice and LGBTQ equality. Dobson said that his organization, the James Dobson Family Institute, “has literally been kept solvent this spring and summer by the Paycheck Protection Plan.” Dobson said that thanks to the money his organization had received, ​adding, “We have not asked for a cent from anybody in six months.”

Other Trump-supporting leaders and organizations have done quite well. Here’s a sampling, drawn from our own research and other reporting on the SBA records:

Initially, the idea of tax dollars directly supporting clergy and church operations was defended as an extraordinary response to the unique situation caused by the pandemic. But on a phone call organized by Paul​a White’s One Voice Prayer Movement in May,former Rep. Randy Forbes ​of Virginia, founder of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, celebrated ​that​ “precedents for religious freedom” that ​are​ being set during the pandemic—specifically the unprecedented use of federal tax dollars to directly fund clergy and churches—“are going to endure long after this coronavirus has gone.”

Marcus Harris, director of faith and community initiatives in the office of Entrepreneurial Development at the SBA, told people in the call, “One thing I’m able to say in my role as the faith-based leader here at SBA is that I know for many of you this is your first interaction with SBA, but we do not want this to be your last,” a sentiment that was repeated by SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza.

Tags: Donald TrumpJames DobsonJentezen FranklinJim BakkerPaula WhiteRick JoynerRobert JeffressSamuel RodriguezChurch-StateCoronavirusElection 2020Trump AdministrationAmerican Center for Law and JusticeFirst Baptist Church DallasLiberty CounselTrump Administration

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religious right’s professed insistence upon “family values” might appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal behavior of many of its leading proponents. Some of this may be due to the general inability of human beings to reflect on conflicting information: I have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bounce off people’s consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely in theory, in the doctrine of “cheap grace,” a derisive term coined by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some religious adherents to believe that once they had been “saved,” not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, too—so one could pretty much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get- out-of-jail-free card. Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn to a new and more Christian life. The religious right is willing to overlook a politician’s individual foibles, no matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify with fundamentalist values. In 2011 the Family Research Council, the fundamentalist lobbying organization, gave Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois an award for “unwavering support of the family.” Representative Walsh’s ex-wife might beg to differ, as she claims he owes her over one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid child support, a charge he denies.

Of course, the proper rituals must be observed before an erring politician can obtain absolution. In November 2011, at a forum sponsored by religious conservatives in Iowa, all of the GOP presidential candidates struck the expected notes of contrition and humility as they laid bare their souls before the assembled congregation (the event was held in a church). Most of them, including Cain, who was then still riding high, choked up when discussing some bleak midnight of their lives (he chose not to address the fresh sexual harassment charges against him, which surely would have qualified as a trying personal experience preying on his mind). Even the old reprobate Gingrich misted up over some contrived misdeed intended to distract attention from his well-known adventures in serial matrimony.

All of these gloomy obsequies of repentance having been observed, Gingrichgave a stirring example of why he is hands-down the best extemporaneous demagogue in contemporary America. Having purged his soul of all guilty transgressions, he turned his attention to the far graver sins bedeviling the American nation.

If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is, which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.

That is as good an example as any of cheap grace as practiced by seasoned statesmen like Gingrich—a bid for redemption turned on its head to provide a forum for one of the Republican Party’s favorite pastimes: taking opportunistic swipes at the dreaded liberal bogeyman. How quickly one forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms inflicted on our nation by godless leftists!

Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. If anything, the two groups are increasingly beginning to resemble each other. Many televangelists have espoused what has come to be known as the prosperity gospel—the health-and- wealth/name-it-and-claim-it gospel of economic entitlement. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too bad! This rationale may explain why some poor voters will defend the prerogatives of billionaires. In any case, at the beginning of the 2012 presidential cycle, those consummate plutocrats the Koch brothers pumped money into Bachmann’s campaign, so one should probably not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.

Most of the religious enthusiasts I observed during my tenure on the Hill seemed to have little reluctance to mix God and Mammon. Rick Santorum did not blink at legislative schemes to pay off his campaign contributors: In 2005 he introduced a bill to forbid the National Weather Service from providing weather forecasts for free that commercial forecasters—like AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania- based company which had contributed to his campaign—wanted to charge for. Tom DeLay’s purported concern about the dignity and sanctity of human life, touchingly on display during the controversy over whether Terri Schiavo’s husband had the right to tell doctors to remove her feeding tube after seeing her comatose for fifteen years, could always be qualified by strategic infusions of campaign cash. DeLay’s quashing of bills to prohibit serious labor abuses demonstrates that even religious virtue can be flexible when there are campaign donations involved.

One might imagine that the religious right’s agenda would be incompatible with the concerns for privacy and individual autonomy by those who consider themselves to belong to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party—the “don’t tread on me,” “live free or die” crowd that Grover Norquist once called the “leave me alone” conservatives. Given their profound distaste for an oppressive and intrusive federal government, one would think they might have trepidations about a religious movement determined to impose statutory controls on private behavior that libertarians nominally hold to be nobody’s business, and particularly not the government’s business.

Some more libertarian-leaning Republicans have in fact pushed back against the religious right. Former House majority leader Dick Armey expressed his profound distaste for the tactics of the religious right in 2006—from the safety of the sidelines—by blasting its leadership in unequivocal terms:

[James] Dobson and his gang of thugsare real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.

Armey had previously been an economics professor at several cow colleges in Texas, and when he came to Congress in 1985, libertarian economics was his forte. I do not recall religious issues motivating his political ideology; instead, economics was what gripped him, particularly the flat tax, which he tirelessly promoted. I believe his departure from Congress was impelled not only by the fact that he was not on the inside track to become Speaker, but also because of his disillusionment with the culture wars, as his passionate denunciation of Dobson suggests. But later, Barack Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party induced a miraculous change of heart in Armey, as no doubt did the need to raise money for his lobbying organization, known as FreedomWorks. By 2009, Armey had become a significant voice of the Tea Party. As such, he attempted to declare a truce between fiscal and social conservatives, who would thenceforth bury their squabbles and concentrate on dethroning the Kenyan usurper in the Oval Office. That meant soft-pedaling social issues that might alarm fiscally conservative but socially moderate voters, particularly women, who lived in the wealthier suburbs.

In September 2010 Armey took one step further in his reconciliation with the people he had called thugs and bullies when he announced that a GOP majority in Congress would again take up the abortion fight, which was only right and proper for those who held such a sincere moral conviction. When the Republicans duly won the House two months later, they did precisely that. State legislatures across the country followed suit: Ohio, Texas, and Virginia enacted the most severe abortion restrictions in any legislative session in memory. Suddenly Armey didn’t seem to have any problem with social issues preempting his economic agenda.

The Tea Party, which initially described itself as wholly concerned with debt, deficit, and federal overreach, gradually unmasked itself as being almost as theocratic as the activists from the religious right that Armey had denounced only a few years before. If anything, they were even slightly more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious issues into the political realm. According to an academic study of the Tea Party, “[T]hey seek ‘deeply religious’ elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates.” The Tea Party faithful are not so much libertarian as authoritarian, the furthest thing from a “live free or die” constitutionalist.

Within the GOP libertarianism is a throwaway doctrine that is rhetorically useful in certain situations but often interferes with their core, more authoritarian, beliefs. When the two precepts collide, the authoritarian reflex prevails. In 2009 it was politically useful for the GOP to present the Tea Party as independent-leaning libertarians, when in reality the group was overwhelmingly Republican, with a high quotient of GOP activists and adherents of views common among the religious right. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, eight in ten Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans. Another study found that over half identified as members of the religious right and 55 percent of Tea Partiers agree that “America has always been and is currently a Christian nation”—6 points more than even the percentage of self-described Christian conservatives who would agree to that. This religious orientation should have been evident from the brouhaha that erupted in mid- 2009 over the charge that the Obama administration’s new healthcare reform plan would set up “death panels.” While there was plenty to criticize about the health-care bill, the completely bogus charge garnered disproportionate attention. Republican political consultants immediately recognized that they had found a classic emotional issue that would resonate with the same people on the religious right who had been stirred up over the Terri Schiavo case. The Tea Party, a supposedly independent group of fiscal conservatives outraged by Obama’s profligate spending plans, fell prey to the hysteria Republican Party operatives whipped up over end-of- life counseling. This self-unmasking of the Tea Party may help explain why, after three years in existence, public support for the organization has been dropping precipitously.

Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure within the GOP in recent years. It is easy enough to see how her tough-guy, every-man-for-himself posturing would be a natural fit with the Wall Street bankers and the right-wing politicians they fund—notwithstanding the bankers’ fondness for government bailouts. But Rand’s philosophy found most of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities. There has always been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.

This camouflaging of intentions is as much a strategy of the religious right and its leaders—James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, and the rest—as it is of the GOP’s more secular political leaders in Washington. After the debacle of the Schiavo case and the electoral loss in 2008, the religious right pulled back and regrouped. They knew that the full-bore, “theoconservative” agenda would not sell with a majority of voters. This strategy accounts for Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition (who famously said that God sent a hurricane to New Orleans to punish the sodomites), stating the following in October 2011: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.” I doubt he thought the candidates held positions that were too extreme, merely that they should keep quiet about those positions until they had won the election. Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues that this is a “lying for Jesus” strategy that fundamentalists often adopt when dealing with the snares of a wicked and Godless world. Since Satan is the father of lies, one can be forgiven for fighting lies with lies.

Hence the policies pursued for at least two decades by the religious right on the federal, state, and local levels. It usually starts at the school board, after some contrived uproar over sex education or liberal indoctrination. The stealthily fundamentalist school board candidates pledge to clean up the mess and “get back to basics.” After a few years they capture a majority on the board, and suddenly “Catcher in the Rye” is heaved out of the curriculum and science teachers are under pressure to teach the (imaginary) controversy about evolutionary biology. This was the path to greater glory of Michele Bachmann: Her first run for public office, barely a dozen years ago, was for a seat on the school board in Stillwater, Minnesota. Up until then she had drawn a taxpayer-funded salary for five years working as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, not, of course, because she was one of those lazy, good-for-nothing government bureaucrats that Republican candidates routinely denounce. She was secretly studying the ways of the government beast so as to defeat it later on.

Bachmann, Rick Perry, and numerous other serving representatives and senators have all had ties to Christian Dominionism, a doctrine proclaiming that Christians are destined to dominate American politics and establish a new imperium resembling theocratic government. According to one profile of Perry, adherents of Dominionism “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.” Note the qualifier: “stealthily.”

At the same religious forum where the GOP candidates confessed their sins, Bachmann went so far as to suggest that organized religion should keep its traditional legal privilege of tax exemption while being permitted to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The fact that government prohibits express political advocacy is in her imagination muzzling preachers rather than just being a quid pro quo for tax-exempt status equivalent to that imposed on any 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 nonprofit organization. But for Bachmann and others of like mind, this is persecution of a kind that fuels their sense of victimhood and righteous indignation.

Reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of the Penguin Group (USA) Inc., from “The Party is Over” by Mike Lofgren

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http://slate.msn.com/id/2109621

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=James_Dobson

James C. Dobson, founder and former president of Focus on the Family, is a psychologist and "former associate clinical professor of pediatrics, USC School of Medicine." He is the host of the "Focus on the Family" radio program. [1]

http://www.dkosopedia.com/wiki/James_Dobson

Rev. James Dobson is the board member and with Gary Bauer cofounder of Focus on the Family (FOF), which has been described as, "perhaps the largest and most dangerous censorship group today" in Dave Marsh's book 50 Ways to Fight Censorship. (Why only perhaps? Why pull punches?)

Dobson is a Protestant Christian fundamentalist family counselor who promotes what he claims are "traditional values." In his best-known book, Dare to Discipline, Dobson advocates beating children with switches, beginning at the age of 18 months. In 1985-86 he served on the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography (the Meese Commission). He claims to have extracted a confession from mass murderer Ted Bundy saying that porn made him do it.

Dobson actively opposes blasphemy, the teaching of evolution, and the "homosexual agenda." In 1991, FOF relocated its 700-employee national headquarters from Pomona, California to Colorado Springs, in time to promote and help pass Colorado's anti-gay Amendment 2. The organization is active throughout the country, operating through such loose affiliates as the Massachusetts Family Institute, and disseminating propaganda through its syndicated radio shows and more than a dozen periodicals. Dobson was quoted in The New York Times as having singled out the wildly popular SpongeBob Squarepants television cartoon series during remarks about the video at a Washington D.C. dinner. See David Kirkpatrick.

 "Conservatives Pick Soft Target: A Cartoon Sponge." The New York Times. January 19, 2005. Christian Rightist Tackles Cartoon Character

SpongeBob, who lives in a pineapple under the sea, was "outed" by the U.S. media in 2002 after reports that the TV show and its merchandise was popular with gays. His creator, Stephen Hillenburg, said at the time that although SpongeBob was an oddball, he thought of all the characters as asexual.

wiki

James Clayton "Jim" Dobson, Jr. (born April 21, 1936) is an American evangelical Christian author, psychologist, and founder of Focus on the Family (FOTF). Dobson, who founded the nonprofit organization in 1977 and also chaired it until 2003, has never drawn a salary from the organization, but has used it to promote his related books and publications and has an income through them.[^^1]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-0)

As part of his role in the organization, he produced Focus on the Family, a daily radio program which according to the organization was broadcast in more than a dozen languages and on over 7,000 stations worldwide, and reportedly heard daily by more than 220 million people in 164 countries.[^^2]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-aboutFF-1)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-PFAW-2)3]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-PFAW-2) Focus on the Family was also carried by about sixty U.S. television stations daily.[^^2]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-aboutFF-1) He founded the Family Research Council in 1981.

He is an evangelical Christian with conservative views on politics.[^^4]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-nytimes20050101-3) He has been referred to as "the nation's most influential evangelical leader" by *Time*, and *Slate* has indicated him as a successor to evangelical leaders Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson.[^^5]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-ctontime-4)[^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-slate04-5)6]^(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dobson#cite_note-slate04-5)

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Focus on the Family founder and chairman James Dobson is perhaps the most influential right-wing Christian leader in the country, with a huge and loyal following that he can reach easily through an impressive media empire.

Click [here for Right Wing Watch posts about Focus on the Family]

:{Focus on the Family

8605 Explorer Drive

Colorado Springs, CO 80920

Website: http://www.family.org/}:

:{Founder: Dr. James C. DobsonPresident/Chief Executive Officer:James D. Daly

Established: 1977 

Finances: $137,848,520 (2004 Focus on the Family revenue); $24,988,036 (2004 Focus on the Family Action revenue) 

Board of Directors: Ted Engstrom, Bobb Beihl, Lee Eaton, Shirley Dobson, Don Hodel, Stephen W. Reed, Robert Hamby, Anthony Wauterlek, Daniel Villanueva; Lt. Gen. Patrick P Caruana, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, Steve Largent, Dr. Albert Mohler, Jr., Dr. Kathleen Nielson (2004)

Staff: approximately 1,300 employees

Publications: 2.3 million subscribers to ten monthly magazines. Magazine titles include: Focus on the Family, Citizen Magazine, Parental Guidance, Clubhouse and Clubhouse Jr. Focus on the Family also publishes a wide variety of books, tapes, films and videos. 

Media: Dr. Dobson is heard daily on more than 3,400 radio facilities in North America, in 15 languages, on approximately 6,300 facilities in 164 countries. Dobson's estimated listening audience is over 220 million people every day, including a program translation carried on all state-owned radio stations in the Republic of China. In the United States, Dobson appears on 80 television stations daily. 

State affiliates: FOF is affiliated with 36 state groups such as the Pennsylvania Family Institute, the North Carolina Policy Council and the Rocky Mountain Family Council. 

Affiliate groups: Focus on the Family Institute, FOF's college program, and Focus on the Family Action, which is FOF's cultural action organization formed under the IRS section 501(c)(4). FOF has 74 different international ministries and has established conservative Christian ministries for attorneys, doctors, teachers, and other groups.}:

Principal Activities

Funding

:{

 }:

About Founder James Dobson

About President Jim Daly

Before coming to FOF Jim Daly worked at International Paper, where he gained experiences in banking, insurance, and product sales. He joined FOF in 1989, when he started out as the assistant to the President of Public Affairs. He eventually moved on to manage the International Field Director position which address relations in Asia, Africa, and Australia. His position now as President is the result of his experienced corporate and business skills, coupled with his ability to make cross-cultural ties.

Quotes from Dr. James Dobson

:{In response to 9/11: "Question: Has God withdrawn His protective hand from the US?" 

James Dobson responds: "Christians have made arguments on both sides of this question. I certainly believe that God is displeased with America for its pride and arrogance, for killing 40 million unborn babies, for the universality of profanity and for other forms of immorality. However, rather than trying to forge a direct cause-and-effect relationship between the terrorist attacks and America's abandonment of biblical principles, which I think is wrong, we need to accept the truth that this nation will suffer in many ways for departing from the principles of righteousness. "The wages of sin is death," as it says in Romans 6, both for individuals and for entire cultures. " 

– Focus on the Family website}:

:{"[The homosexual] agenda includes teaching pro-homosexual [sic] concepts in the public schools, redefining the family to represent "any circle of people who love each other," approval of homosexual adoption, legitimizing same-sex marriage, and securing special rights for those who identify themselves as gay. Those ideas must be opposed, even though to do so is to expose oneself to the charge of being "homophobic." 

– "Complete Marriage and Family Home Reference Guide" by James Dobson}:

:{"Does the Republican Party want our votes, no strings attached—to court us every two years, and then to say, 'Don't call me; I'll call you'—and to not care about the moral law of the universe?...Is that what they want? Is that the way the system works? Is this the way it's going to be? If it is, I'm gone, and if I go, I will do everything I can to take as many people with me as possible."

– Statement from 02/07/98 Council for National Policy meeting, Washington Times, February 17, 1998}:

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Updated: September 2006

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^-^ ^See ^more at: http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/focus-family#sthash.TqYHmxUd.dpuf

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James Dobson Posts Archive

Right Wing Leftovers - 4/11/13

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Thursday 04/11/2013, 5:30pm

Fox News reports that "at least a dozen members of Congress have signed a letter demanding the Secretary of the Army rescind and apologize for a briefing that labeled Evangelical Christians and Catholics as religious extremist groups." Jim Graves, who barely lost to Rep. Michele Bachmann last time around, will be launching another campaign to face her again in 2014. Ken Hutcherson says "progressives on the left side of the debate have an agenda, and it's the same one Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin had." James Dobson grieves "over what Obama and the... MORE >

Right Wing Leftovers - 3/22/13

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Friday 03/22/2013, 5:29pm

Glenn Beck calls Rabbi Daniel Lapin "David Barton on steroids," so that pretty much tells you all you need to know about Lapin. Ohio's Republican Gov. John Kasich announced his support for civil unions ... and then immediately backtracked. I cannot believe that we were denied the joys of a Gingrich-Santorum unity ticket! "Family Research Council has taken a bold new action," by which it means launching a daily radio program hosted by Tony Perkins, for which it needs money, of course. Finally, James Dobson says that "at times it seems as though... MORE >

Garlow: Obama Should Have Repented During the State of Union Address

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Monday 03/18/2013, 11:10am

Today, James Dobson’s Family Talk radio program aired a sermon that pastor Jim Garlow delivered at a recent Religious Right conference in which he said that President Obama should have publicly repented during his State of the Union address. Garlow, who during the address tweeted that Obama will “destroy” America and has an “obsession with homosexuality,” said that the president should have repented over his views on legal abortion, marriage equality and the national debt. We gathered and we huddled around TV sets on Tuesday night to hear the State of the... MORE >

Santorum: Obama Pushing 'Godlessness' on America

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Wednesday 03/13/2013, 4:25pm

Rick Santorum and James Dobson are back together again, this time promoting Dobson’s “dystopian thriller” on Patriot Voices Radio, which is Santorum’s new radio show. The former presidential candidate said that the Obama administration is pushing “godlessness” and is “overtly hostile to people of faith,” to which Dobson agreed and predicted the creation of euthanasia clinics in the future that result from a dramatic decline in the birth rate. Later, Dobson lamented that he has “never seen a time when there was less common sense in... MORE >

Beck: James Dobson's New Novel Is a Modern Day 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Monday 02/25/2013, 2:26pm

Last week, James Dobson stopped by Glenn Beck's television program last week to discuss his new novel "Fatherless," a "faith-based, dystopian thriller" set in the year 2042. Dobson warned Beck that there is something deeply wrong with a society in which more and more couples are deciding not to have children, which prompted Beck to want to know how we can change the "hardness of people's hearts" that is at the root of this problem.  After Dobson asserted, predictably, that a lack of Christian faith is the ultimate cause, Beck agreed and predicated... MORE >

Dobson Falsely Claims It Is Now Illegal for Doctors to Provide Stents to Anyone over the Age of 70

SUBMITTED BY: Kyle Mantyla, Wednesday 02/06/2013, 5:28pm

If Congress had recently passed, and President Obama signed, legislation making it illegal for anyone over the age of 70 to receive a stent for treatment of heart blockages, you would think that is the sort of thing that might have made news and people would have heard something about it. If such a law had been passed, you would think we'd be able to find at least one news story about is somewhere and it wouldn't be the sort of thing we'd have to learn third-hand from someone like James Dobson, who claims to have heard this unconfirmed report from some unnamed physician, right... MORE >

The Five Craziest Right-Wing Attacks on Hillary Clinton's Job as Secretary of State

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Thursday 01/31/2013, 1:00pm

For decades, the Right has attempted to discredit Hillary Clinton with attacks ranging from the disturbing (killing people) to the bizarre (killing cats). But after serving four years as Secretary of State, Clinton is leaving office with sky-high approval ratings. Before she steps down on Friday, we decided to look back on some of the most extreme and befuddling accusations she has faced from the far-right during her term as the nation’s top diplomat. 1. Clinton Engineered Benghazi Cover-Up While the official report on the U.S. mission in Benghazi found multiple security and management... MORE >

Dobson: 'Everything I Have Fought For is On the Line and is in Danger Now'

SUBMITTED BY: Brian Tashman, Wednesday 01/16/2013, 12:35pm

For the past two days, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson has been promoting his new dystopian novel, “Fatherless,” about a conspiracy to depopulate the earth. Dobson’s guest on Family Talk was co-author and former Focus vice president Kurt Bruner, who joined him in warning that the U.S. is entering a demographic crisis. Yesterday, Dobson lamented that “recently this nation has lurched to the left” and that “everything I have fought for is on the line and is in danger now.” Dobson’s sentiments reflect his monthly newsletter where he said... MORE >

Ted Bundy

On the afternoon before he was executed Bundygranted an interview to James Dobson, a psychologist and founder of the Christian evangelical organization Focus on the Family.[317] He used the opportunity to make new statements about violence in the media and the pornographic "roots" of his crimes. "It happened in stages, gradually," he said. "My experience with ... pornography that deals on a violent level with sexuality, is once you become addicted to it ... I would keep looking for more potent, more explicit, more graphic kinds of material. Until you reach a point where the pornography only goes so far ... where you begin to wonder if maybe actually doing it would give that which is beyond just reading it or looking at it."[318] Violence in the media, he said, "particularly sexualized violence," sent boys "down the road to being Ted Bundys."[319] The FBI, he suggested, should stake out adult movie houses and follow patrons as they leave.[6] "You are going to kill me," he said, "and that will protect society from me. But out there are many, many more people who are addicted to pornography, and you are doing nothing about that."[319]

Multiple biographers,[320][321][322] researchers,[323] and other observers[324] have concluded that Bundy's sudden condemnation of pornography was one last manipulative attempt to shift blame by catering to Dobson's agenda as a longtime anti-pornography advocate, telling him precisely what he wanted to hear.[325] While he asserted in the Dobson interview that detective magazines and other reading material had "corrupted" him and "fueled [his] fantasies ... to the point of becoming a serial killer", in a 1977 letter to Ann Rule he wrote, "Who in the world reads these publications? ... I have never purchased such a magazine, and [on only] two or three occasions have I ever picked one up."[326] He told Michaud and Aynsworth in 1980, and Hagmaier the night before he spoke to Dobson, that pornography played a negligible role in his development as a serial killer.[327] "The problem wasn't pornography," wrote Dekle. "The problem was Bundy."[328]  ^wiki

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