Maryland Blogger alliance
The Maryland Blogger Alliance
Born-Again Bigotry
I realize that it has become fashionable to refer to Evangelical Christians as bigots. By and large, I think people exaggerate or attack ad hominem when doing so. For example, a person certainly is entitled to hold the opinion that homosexuality is immoral without being considered a bigot.
But I have to draw the line at the latest from Focus on the Family, an announcement about putative Presidential candidate Fred Dalton Thompson. If this is not bigotry, I am at pains for a better word to describe it.
Dobson Offers Insight on 2008 Republican Hopefuls
Focus on Family Founder Snubs Thompson, Praises Gingrich
By Dan GilgoffPosted 3/28/07Focus on the Family founder James Dobson appeared to throw cold water on a possible presidential bid by former Sen. Fred Thompson while praising former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is also weighing a presidential run, in a phone interview Tuesday.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Thompson, took issue with Dobson's characterization of the former Tennessee senator. "Thompson is indeed a Christian," he said. "He was baptized into the Church of Christ."
In a follow-up phone conversation, Focus on the Family spokesman Gary Schneeberger stood by Dobson's claim. He said that, while Dobson didn't believe Thompson to be a member of a non-Christian faith, Dobson nevertheless "has never known Thompson to be a committed Christian—someone who talks openly about his faith."
"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."
Thompson has said he is leaving the door open for a presidential run and has won plaudits from conservatives who are unenthusiastic about the Republican front-runners. A Gallup-USA Today poll, released Tuesday, showed Thompson in third place among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Sen. John McCain.
While making it clear he was not endorsing any Republican presidential candidate, Dobson, who is considered the most politically powerful evangelical figure in the country, also said that Gingrich was the "brightest guy out there" and "the most articulate politician on the scene today."
Gingrich recently appeared on Dobson's daily Focus on the Family radio program, carried by upward of 2,000 American radio stations, where he made headlines by discussing an extramarital affair he was having even as he pursued impeachment against President Bill Clinton for his handling of the investigation into the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Dobson's phone call to U.S. News senior editor Dan Gilgoff Tuesday was unsolicited. It marked Gilgoff's first discussion with Dobson in over two years, since the magazine's political writer began work on The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War, published this month by St. Martin's Press. Dobson had agreed to answer only written questions for the book.
Dobson's comments yesterday about the 2008 presidential race appear to be his first to a secular news organization in months.
Dobson recently sat down with former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney at Focus on the Family's Colorado Springs headquarters, marking his only meeting to date with a top-tier Republican presidential candidate. While Dobson would not comment directly on the Romney meeting, he stood by comments he made late last year that many evangelicals would find it difficult to support Romney because of his Mormonism.
It's interesting that the evangelicals might throw their support to Gingrich, who while not as bad as Bill Clinton has a problem keeping his pants zipped. Of course, the evangelical movement has a rich history of sex scandals, not least of which have involved Ted Haggard and Jimmy Swaggart. It would be tempting to make a snarky remark about the number of offspring born to Evangelical families, but I'll hold my tongue...
The real message here is that Dobson and his henchmen don't consider a person a Christian unless he's an "evangelical Christian." I have had some direct experience with these folks, when I was running an old-book shop in Baltimore. Though I have never figured it out, apparently there is some kind of secret sign or password that these folks use to recognize each other. I've lost track of the number of times an Evangelical started hammering on me about what he perceived to be my apostasy, with no evidence one way or another.
Here in Baltimore, the evangelicals put out a little yellow-pages book of their own, called the "Shepherd's Guide." While anyone can advertise in it, if you take a pledge that you agree with their creed, the publishers will put a little silhouette-type logo on your ad. So perhaps all these bookshop customers were just consulting their little book before they hit my shop, and not seeing me as an advertiser, assuming the worst.
For what it's worth, the evangelicals were also the only people who would come into the book shop and demand that a particular title be removed, because it upset their Christian sensibilities. Of course, if I'd removed the books that pandered to their particular flavor of belief, they'd have sworn there was a "war against Christians," or some such exaggeration.