Is Dobson's Obama Hit Backfiring?

Time magazine has a new story entitled "Is Dobson's Obama Hit Backfiring?" and from the contents, it looks like the egotistical, homophobic, false Christian Dobson may have shot himself in the foot when he attacked Barack Obama earlier in the week. Moreover, the story suggests that people - including evangelicals - may, in fact, be waking up to the fact that Daddy Dobson does NOT represent as many Christians as he once did. While his insufferable ego is inflated as ever, Time did a story in January, 2008, that indicated that Dobson's Focus on the Family has been losing membership and had declining revenues for each of the last five years. One can only hope that more and more of the public will come to recognize Dobson and those like him for the mean spirited, hate-filled individuals that they are and that they are not a true Christian in light of their non-stop message of hate, intolerance and denigration of others. Here are some highlights from the new Time story:

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After years of attacking Democrats with relative impunity for their supposed moral failings, Evangelical leader James Dobson surely didn't expect to suffer much of a backlash when he trained his sights on Barack Obama. . . . Earlier this week, Dobson used his popular Christian radio program to denounce a 2006 speech the Illinois senator gave about the place of religion in public life.

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But less than 24 hours after Dobson's radio broadcast, www.jamesdobsondoesntspeakforme.com was up and running on the Web. The site displays both Dobson's charges against Obama and Obama's own quotes from the 2006 speech. It also features a statement condemning Dobson that reads in part: "James Dobson doesn't speak for me when he uses religion as a wedge to divide; he doesn't speak for me when he speaks as the final arbiter on the meaning of the Bible."

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It's hard out there for a Christian Right leader. Last December came and went with barely a peep about a grinchy liberal "War on Christmas." The Republican nominee, John McCain, has refused to make the pilgrimage to Colorado Springs, telling the Focus on the Family leader to come to him instead. But the biggest problem is that Democrats —and Barack Obama in particular — are determined to make a play for a bloc of voters over whom Dobson and his colleagues have traditionally maintained exclusive control. And those voters seem willing to listen.

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Just a few weeks earlier, the conservative columnist and former Moral Majority vice president Cal Thomas wrote an essay calling Obama a "false prophet." Placing Obama's "Christianity" in quotes, Thomas charged that the candidate's statements about religion — including his belief that non-Christians can get to heaven — prove that he does not understand what it means to be a Christian.
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But if the grassroots reaction is any indication, the attacks on Obama have been largely self-defeating. After Thomas' column ran, dozens of regional papers that carry it were flooded with letters to the editor — and they were hardly in liberal bastions. In places like Augusta, Georgia, and Lubbock, Texas, people wrote in to criticize Thomas' attack on Obama. "To suggest that anyone is not a Christian because they do not adhere to Cal Thomas' narrow interpretation of what a Christian should believe," wrote one Texan, "is extremely intolerant, ignorant, and downright insulting."