Playing With Fire

Just how much will the Bush administration do to satisfy its religious-right base? Michael Crowley over at Slate has an article about James Dobson, the uber-evangelical who heads up Focus on the Family, a ministry that "gets so much mail it has its own zip code."



After being less than enthused about W in 2000, Dobson campaigned hard for Bush this time. What drove Dobson, who supposedly finds the compromises of politics disgusting, to enter the nasty fray, and what does he want in return? Hint: you get three guesses, and the first two don't count.



Right the first time! Yes indeed, Dobson's special wrath is reserved for gays. Crowley describes Dobson's preoccupation with the issue of homosexuality:



It was the gay-marriage debate that finally hurled Dobson into politics wholeheartedly. The subject of homosexuality seems to exert a special power over him, and he has devoted much idiosyncratic thought to it. When discussing gays he spares no detail, no matter how prurient. In Bringing Up Boys, he gleefully reprints a letter he received from a 13-year-old boy who describes wiggling his naked body in front of the mirror to 'make my genitals bounce up and down' and admits to having 'tried more than once to suck my own penis (to be frank).' Dobson believes that such adolescents suffer from what he calls 'pre-homosexuality,' a formative stage which results from having a weak father figure. Dobson further contends that homosexuality, especially in such an early stage, can be 'cured.' His ministry runs a program called Love Won Out that seeks to convert 'ex-gays' to heterosexuality. (Alas, the program's director, a self-proclaimed 'ex-gay' himself, was spotted at a gay bar in 2000, an episode Dobson downplayed as 'a momentary setback.')



What Dobson wants from Bush is nothing less than an all-out, fire-and-brimstone assault on gay rights. But he'd better not be holding his breath; the GOP has used the religious right far more than it has served it. Dobson, for all his support this year, seems to know it:



Dobson himself predicted future disappointment during an appearance on ABC's This Week last Sunday. Asked whether Bush would fail evangelicals, Dobson replied, "I'm sure he will fail us. He doesn't dance to our tune."



The America Dobson wants, if he gets it, will drive away independent and moderate voters, as Crowley points out. If he doesn't get it, he may well withdraw his support for the Republican candidate in 2008, a move that in 2000 is thought to have cost W a good many votes.



Damned if they do, or damned if they don't? Either way, the GOP could wind up viewing its dealings with the radical right in a more Mephistophelian light.