A number of social conservatives, myself included, have recently been asked to respond to the news that Mary Cheney, the Vice President’s daughter, is pregnant with a child she intends to raise with her lesbian partner. Implicit in this issue is an effort to get us to criticize the Bush Administration or the Cheney family. But the concern here has nothing to do with politics. It is about what kind of family environment is best for the health and development of children, and, by extension, the nation at large.
With all due respect to Cheney and her partner, Heather Poe, the majority of more than 30 years of social-science evidence indicates that children do best on every measure of well-being when raised by their married mother and father.…According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences. Other researchers have determined that boys are not born with an understanding of "maleness." They have to learn it, ideally from their fathers.
I’ve got to give him his due. It really took balls for James Dobson to write this kind of total malarkey in a national magazine like Time [wonder why they published it?]. Carol Gilligan came zooming out of the gate with her response:
Dear Dr. Dobson:
I am writing to ask that you cease and desist from quoting my research in the future. I was mortified to learn that you had distorted my work this week in a guest column you wrote in Time Magazine. Not only did you take my research out of context, you did so without my knowledge to support discriminatory goals that I do not agree with. What you wrote was not truthful and I ask that you refrain from ever quoting me again and that you apologize for twisting my work.
From what I understand, this is not the first time you have manipulated research in pursuit of your goals. This practice is not in the best interest of scientific inquiry, nor does bearing false witness serve your purpose of furthering morality and strengthening the family.
Finally, there is nothing in my research that would lead you to draw the stated conclusions you did in the Time article. My work in no way suggests same-gender families are harmful to children or can’t raise these children to be as healthy and well adjusted as those brought up in traditional households.
I trust that this will be the last time my work is cited by Focus on the Family.
Sincerely,Carol Gilligan, PhD
Dobson also said:
The voices that argue otherwise tell us more about our politically correct culture than they do about what children really need. The fact remains that gender matters–perhaps nowhere more than in regard to child rearing. The unique value of fathers has been explained by Dr. Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School in his book Fatherneed: Why Father Care Is as Essential as Mother Care for Your Child. Pruett says dads are critically important simply because "fathers do not mother." Psychology Today explained in 1996 that "fatherhood turns out to be a complex and unique phenomenon with huge consequences for the emotional and intellectual growth of children." A father, as a male parent, makes unique contributions to the task of parenting that a mother cannot emulate, and vice versa.
Truth Wins Out urged Time Magazine today to renounce a guest column written by James C. Dobson in this week’s magazine after a second professor, Kyle Pruett, M.D. of the Yale School of Medicine, expressed concerns that the Focus on the Family leader "cherry picked" his work. In a letter to Time and Dobson, Dr. Pruett asked that Focus on the Family, "not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission."
Pruett wrote the following letter:
Dr. Dobson,I was startled and disappointed to see my work referenced in the current Time Magazine piece in which you opined that social science, such as mine, supports your convictions opposing lesbian and gay parenthood. I write now to insist that you not quote from my research in your media campaigns, personal or corporate, without previously securing my permission. You cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions. On page 134 of the book you cite in your piece, I wrote, “What we do know is that there is no reason for concern about the development or psychological competence of children living with gay fathers. It is love that binds relationships, not sex.”Kyle Pruett, M.D. Yale School of Medicine
James Dobson completes his ode to “Leave it to Beaver” by saying, ” traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience, is still the foundation on which the well-being of future generations depends.” Mr. Dobson continually avoids the issue of whether two loving, long-term same-sex parents are healthier for a child than that of an unwanted child or as the product of an absentee or abusive father, including one who is the product of incest or rape (even by a husband). The issue of real world situations is too distasteful for Mr. Dobson. In Mr. Dobson’s world all mothers stay home and bake cookies, and fathers arrive home in time to play baseball with their Sunday-schooled children. Never does Mr. Dobson address the here-and-now- the real world, and the myriad difficulties that parents and children throughout the world confront. .
His frequent references to the “traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience” is specious. The vast majority of our planet practices multiple partnering, if not outright polygamy. Many cultures practice raising children communally. Africa, Islam, 19th century Asia, Mormons, and many other cultures don’t fit so easily into Dobson’s “because I-say-it’s-so” traditional family. Even in our advanced “Christian-American” culture women were considered “chattel”- property- until fairly recently.
Dobson’s idea of the “traditional” family model simply collapses under the weight of reality, even if culturally we may wish the Ozzie & Harriet model was the gold standard . An intellectual study of the Bible, of which Mr. Dobson is so fond of referring to for “moral certitude,” reveals multiple generations of stolen and sold wives, stolen birthrights, patricide and fratricide worthy of the more nefarious Stephen King novel. Like most right-wing Christians, Mr. Dobson freely picks chapter and verse to proclaim his morality, while ignoring anything that might shed actual light upon his man-made dogma.
Mr. Dobson goes out of his way on his “FOTF” site to ignore the only direct reference Jesus made to marital relationships, “Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, commits adultery against her. And if a woman shall put away her husband, and be married to another, she commits adultery†(Mark 10:3–12). Similarly, If Mr. Dobson was scripturally honest, he would be trumpeting Paul’s glorification of slavery in Colossians 3:22: “The servant,who knew his lord’s will, and did not follow it, shall be beaten with many stripes.” Mr. Dobson’s brand of fundamentalism bludgeons the slaves of ignorance, believers who listen without question, while Dobson dismisses or ignores the vast bulk of contradictory scriptural references in both Testaments, to focus on homosexuals. Mr. Dobson’s kind will ignore Paul’s admonitions about wives – “Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” (Ephesians 5:22), but watch him erect the holy-rolling judgement ramp when he needs to fill the coffers, 30 pieces of silver at a time, with anti-Gay vitriol.
Clearly, Mr. Dobson, and his ministry buddies like Fred Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker and Jerry Falwell know that money for spewing hatred doesn’t come cheap, unless one twists the Truth and inflame the masses with hatred. Perhaps they should be spending their time obeying the Gospel once they are able to pull the plank out of their own eyes:
“Alas for you, lawyers and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like tombs covered with whitewash; they look well from the outside, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all kinds of filth. So it is with you: outside you look like honest men, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and crime.”
(Matthew 23: 27-28)
Thanks. What a thorough comment!