Image via Wikipedia

Where to start? I guess a good place would be the fact that I am not supporting any particular presidential candidate at this point; I haven’t done enough research to justify support yet. I’m a long-time conservative, but I’m getting more moderate by the year (in part thanks to stupid conservatives). It’s also possibly relevant to this post that I’m pro-life, so naturally I disagree with Barack Obama on the issue of abortion.

However, that’s not what has me irritated at the moment. No, that special honor goes to James Dobson and Tom Minnery of “Focus on the Family Action.” I’m familiar with the Focus on the Family organization (hey, they make “Adventures in Odyssey,” my favorite kids’ radio program) and I’m guessing the “Action” suffix means that this is their political activism arm.

Well, if what I heard today is what constitutes political activism, I really wish they’d either give it up or do a better job of it.

The piece that got my attention was a forwarded email with the subject line, “Obama lashes out at Dr. Dobson.” A nice little bit of hype, right?

As a Christian, I am interested in knowing about faith-related views and actions of the candidates, so I took the bait and read the email.

The “lashes out” part? From the email: “On Tuesday, presidential candidate Barack Obama lashed out at Dr. Dobson and accused Dr. Dobson of ‘making stuff up’ about Obama.”

Okay, that merits some investigation, especially since the original email was directly from Dobson’s organization, but first I finished the rest of the email, which purported to summarize the events leading up to this point. Honestly, I can’t pick which parts to share, so I’ll excerpt the rest of the email here:

Here is what happened. On Tuesday’s Focus on the Family radio broadcast (paid for by Focus Action), Dr. Dobson and I dissected a 2006 speech in which Obama made some very disturbing statements about his understating of Christianity, the role of religion in government and specifically Dr. Dobson.

Please click here to watch Obama’s speech, listen to Dr. Dobson’s comments, and more.

Obama compares Dr. Dobson to Al Sharpton
In that 2006 speech, after stating that we are not a Christian nation, Obama directly compared Dr. Dobson to Al Sharpton. Obama then continued with an extremely convoluted discussion of the Bible – from Levitical law to the Sermon on the Mount – that caused Dr. Dobson to say Obama was “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview.”

While Obama’s statements about Dr. Dobson are offensive, Obama’s misunderstanding of the Bible is alarming — especially considering the blind faith so many of our fellow Americans seem to have in him!

Again, I want you to hear and see for yourself what Obama said, as well as Dr. Dobson’s comments.

These are extremely important issues that we must contend with. That is why Focus Action sponsored this radio broadcast – and it’s why we will not stand by silently as any public figure drags biblical understanding through the gutter or undermines the role of people of faith in our society.

It struck me as a little odd that this clamor centered around a speech that is two years old, but I was curious about “drag[ing] biblical understanding through the gutter” and the accusation that Obama was “deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview.”

Frankly, I don’t follow enough of the political-religious uproar to be very familiar with Al Sharpton, but clearly Dr. Dobson was appalled at the comparison, so I finally decided to just watch Obama’s speech.

It was longer than I expected, so I tidied the office at the same time, eagerly listening for the gutter-dragging or the Dobson segment (since the email said that Obama “specifically” targeted Dobson).

Imagine my disappointment (well, more confusion) when the only mention of Dr. Dobson was a single rhetorical question that pointed out that American Christians can’t agree on the practical applications of their faith.

Following up on the point that Christians are not the only folks who live in America (hard to argue that, though believe it or not, Dobson tried), this is what Obama actually said:

And even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would it be James Dobson’s, or Al Sharpton’s?

Yes, that is the dreaded spot where “Obama directly compared Dr. Dobson to Al Sharpton.”

Do you remember in grade school where the teacher had you “compare and contrast”? To me, this is a whole lot more “contrast” than “compare,” but maybe I’m just getting caught up in semantics.

In any case, I don’t see how any reasonable person could find the statement offensive. I suppose that Dobson is probably a little hyper-sensitive because of the arena in which he operates, but that doesn’t seem like a good excuse for throwing logic out the window.

As for the distortions of the Bible, I really didn’t hear them. I was keeping my ears open for them, but just didn’t hear anything that struck me as “distorting” or even non-traditional (and believe me, I think you can do far worse than “non-traditional”).

Admittedly, though, I’m a person who can sometimes be swayed too easily by polished arguments, so I thought I’d let Dr. Dobson take a stab at enlightening me. After I finished Obama’s speech, I hit play on Dobson’s podcast.

It’s really too bad I’ll never get that 30 minutes of my life back again (but at least my desk is a little neater…).

I found the program in turns ignorant, misleading, and manipulative. I honestly can’t tell whether Dobson and his cohort really never listened to Obama’s speech or are just deliberately being obtuse.

They consistently took segments out of context—if a production assistant trimmed the speech to those sound-bytes and that’s all the hosts had to go off of, that could explain the lack of intelligent discussion, but I would sincerely hope that their journalism skills are a little better than that (of course, the alternative is probably worse).

Beyond that, they jumped to crazy conclusions (some were almost laughable, if it wasn’t for the fact that these things that actually matter), for instance, that Obama was accusing Dobson of wanting to expel non-Christians from the country. They attacked his brief summaries of biblical viewpoints (which I found to be pretty accurate—his summaries, that is, not their attacks). They just generally made fools of themselves.

Finally, after sitting through the whole broadcast in the interest of being informed and fair, I did a search to find out what Obama actually said when he “lashed out at Dr. Dobson.”

This article covers it pretty well, and essentially, Obama simply rejected Dobson’s attacks and said, “I think you’ll see that he was just making stuff up, maybe for his own purposes.”

Well, I’d pretty much agree with that.

A quote from the article:

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own worldview, his own confused theology,” Dobson said.

Asked about Dobson’s assessment, Obama said “somebody would be pretty hard-pressed to make that argument” that he was distorting the Bible.

You think?

Gosh, that is a vicious and hurtful attack, now, isn’t it?!?

Give me a break. And please stop using illogical, out-of-context rhetoric to sucker your devoted listeners, most of whom will probably follow your lead and not listen to the actual speech.

Dr. Dobson should hold to a higher standard, “especially considering the blind faith so many of our fellow Americans seem to have in him!”