a Dobson footnote…

Posted on Saturday 25 November 2006

There’s women in the church,
    Oh my Lord…
With paint on their faces.
    Oh my Lord…
Take some water ‘n wash it off,
And let the the church roll on.
…….[traditional]   Flatt and Scruggs

I don’t personally think about gay marriage issue much. If gay people want to enter lifelong marital contracts, it’s fine with me. But my interest is more in why it’s such a big deal in politics. One doesn’t have to look very far to find the answer – James Dobson of Focus on the Family. In his book, Marriage Under Fire, he lists ten reasons to be against same-sex marriages. Mostly they cluster around the destruction of traditional marriages, and the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it – apocalyptic themes. But there’s one reason, down at the bottom of the list, that might explain a lot of the furor. Certainly, its internal logic is in question. How homosexual unions will "create millions of motherless children and fatherless kids" isn’t exactly clear. But it may be an underpinning of all the noise.

Argument #9

Perhaps most important, the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be severely curtailed. The family has been God’s primary vehicle for evangelism since the beginning.

Its most important assignment has been the propagation of the human race and the handing down of the faith to our children. Malachi 2:15 reads, referring to husbands and wives, "Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are His. And why one? Because He was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth" (NIV).

That responsibility to teach the next generation will never recover from the loss of committed, God-fearing families. The younger generation and those yet to come will be deprived of the Good News, as has already occurred in France, Germany and other European countries. Instead of providing for a father and mother, the advent of homosexual marriage will create millions of motherless children and fatherless kids. This is morally wrong, and is condemned in Scripture. Are we now going to join the Netherlands and Belgium to become the third country in the history of the world to "normalize" and legalize behavior that has been prohibited by God himself? Heaven help us if we do!
In the view of Evangelical Christianity, man is basically evil and hedonistic [original sin]. It is only through religious conversion that man becomes moral. Well, that’s not entirely true. Parenting has something to do with morality too. In psychoanalytic theory, the moral injunctions of the parents  are internalized around age five or six, and personal morality is then revised by contact with society, and later by society as a whole. While Dobson speaks as a psychologist, he is, at heart, an evangelical. His idea that the best milieu for a child’s development is a functioning, intact family is of course correct, but he takes things to extremes unknown to most in the psychological fields. And his ideas about the dangers of kids "becoming" homosexuals is entirely his own construction.

His arguments against gay marriage are in the range of fanciful, so one wonders why he is so focused on this topic. In his Argument #9, we may find the answer. He believes that gay marriage will decrease the number of "families." This line, "the advent of homosexual marriage will create millions of motherless children and fatherless kids" is beyond my understanding. But even though it’s hard to follow his thinking, that’s what he thinks. Since families are the mainstay of Christian Churches, "the spread of the Gospel of Jesus Christ will be severely curtailed. The family has been God’s primary vehicle for evangelism since the beginning."

And there we have it. Dobson is opposing gay marriage at least in part because, in his mind, it will decrease the number of families, thus destroy the church, and the evangelists won’t have anyone to evangelize to [on][at]. So, the American government must stop gay marriage in its tracks, to preserve evangelical Christianity? How hard is that to follow?

To hell with the Bill of Rights
And let the church roll on.

Amazing! Just amazing!

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