1 Boring Old Man

KING: We discussed this before in the past, but not recently: Do you still believe that being gay is a choice rather than a given?

DOBSON: I never did believe that.

KING: Oh, you don’t believe it.

DOBSON: I don’t believe that. Neither do I believe it’s genetic. I said that…

KING: Then what is it?

DOBSON: I said that on your program one time and both of us got a lot of mail for it. I don’t blame homosexuals for being angry when people say they’ve made a choice to be gay because they don’t. It usually comes out of very, very early childhood, and this is very controversial, but this is what I believe and many other people believe, that is has to do with an identity crisis that occurs to early to remember it, where a boy is born with an attachment to his mother and she is everything to him for about 18 months, and between 18 months and five years, he needs to detach from her and to reattach to his father. It’s a very important developmental task and if his dad is gone or abusive or disinterested or maybe there’s just not a good fit there. What’s he going to do? He remains bonded to his mother and…

KING: Is that clinically true or is that theory?

DOBSON: No, it’s clinically true, but it’s controversial. What homosexual activists, especially, would like everybody to believe is that it is genetic, that they don’t have any choice. If it were genetic, Larry — and before we went on this show, you and I were talking about twin studies — if it were genetic, identical twins would all have it. Identical twins, if you have a homosexuality in one twin, it would be there in the other.

KING: Right.

DOBSON: So, it can’t be simply genetic. I do believe that there are temperaments that individuals are born with that make them more vulnerable and maybe more likely to move in that direction, but it usually is related to a sexual identity crisis.

But that’s not what wrankles me about his pseudoscience. It’s the part about "genetic." No one’s saying homosexuality is genetic. Think about it. How would it be passed on? Homosexuality is "biologic," not "genetic." Biologic means caused by biologic factors. The brains of homosexuals are different from those of heterosexual people. The "why" of that is unknown at this point. But his pseudo-freudian malarkey doesn’t change brains. What is different can be seen under a microscope! Something happens in fetal development that produces homosexuality. And that’s that…

James Dobson is a fool. He espouses his absurd theory as if it’s fact. He’s equally facile with advice. In his book, Bringing Up Boys, he gives the advice that fathers should take showers with their sons so they can see dad’s big penis and want to grow up and be like dad – a homosexuality preventive measure. Where does he get such ideas? For one thing, that’s not a particularly great idea. For another thing, what the boy would be thinking would not be what he proposes. The kid would be thinking something more like, "What’s wrong with dad?"

Dobson came into prominance with a book that said it was okay to spank children. Most of his advice has to do with "good old time" family stuff, discipline, spanking, heavy church-going, marriage, etc. The Religious Right jumped on it as an antidote to what they perceived to be the decline of the family. Over the years, he’s parlayed his Psychology Degree into a self-proclaimed expert status. making up things that fit the views of the Religious Right. But it’s in the area of homosexuality that he’s become a shining star. In spite of his claims [above] that homosexuality happens early in life for one reason or another [his reasons change], he recommends this father-son shower thing as a quick fix. But the centerpiece of things is his notion of the "homosexual agenda." He believes homosexuals are trying to achieve acceptance as a valid minority in society in order to recruit children into homosexuality. In spite of saying that it happens very early, he apparently believes that kids get recruited later too. It’s really a bizarre set of ideas loosely wound together such that in raising boys, the task is to immunize them from being recruited. What in the hell is he talking about? There’s nothing in any of these ideas that is close to anything scientific. They’re just the opinions of an old homophobe, presumabely left over from some piece of his own biography that he’s not talking about.