Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child.  Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…

I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.

I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…

Well somebody needs to look at it.  Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children.  And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…

For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?

I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.

This is sickening.  Of course an infant will cry when its left alone.  Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t.  Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for.  For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain.  The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation  that something’s wrong.  But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel. 

And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation.  Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow…  Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another.  Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.

There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:

"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."

You can read the chilling conclusion here.

If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself.  They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies.  Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life.  Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy.  Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you.  You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy.  A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another.  You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate. 

No…I’m not exaggerating…

This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?

My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?

(emphasis mine)  I’ve seen that with my own two eyes.  Guy I dated once had a father like that.  Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with.  And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory.  There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you.  The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them.  If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope.  Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out.  Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would.  The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing.  It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself.  They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.

And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself.  The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…

Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.

To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here.  But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority.  I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take.  Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.  Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.

…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"…  Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come.  Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.

[Edited a tad…]