JAMES DOBSON IS DEAD. AND HE’S GOING TO HELL.
By dying, on August 21 Dr. James Dobson, evangelical thought leader, anti-gay activist, and staunch defender of child abuse, did the only good thing he ever did with his life.
photo illustration by Evan Urquhart
Opinion, by Piper Bly
I.
It is fall in the mid-aughts. I was in seventh or eighth grade, and like most LCMS raised kids, my Wednesday evenings were spent in Catechism class. Our pastor had singled me out somewhat early as a potential candidate for pastorhood. I was “gifted”, as they put it; bright, precocious, good with words and quick to grasp concepts and see patterns. At one point, he bribed me with a “top of the line laptop”–I was rather into computers at the time–if I took a year or two at Concordia Seminary.
The subject that evening was Christianity’s views on sexuality. I don’t remember much of the class’s lecture, but I do vividly remember the pastor–one of the few non-overtly abusive male figures in my life–talking about how homosexuals were destroying the family, destroying the sanctity of marriage, and were sick in the head. He quoted Dobson a few times and praised the work people like him did to protect the average Christian from the sinful threat of the homosexual’s encroachment upon God’s holy union before smiling and joking that “it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.”
Unbeknownst to him, I had been wrestling with my sexuality and gender since my age was in single digits. My adoptive parents, encouraged by the Church’s teachings and Dr. James Dobson’s writings, would frequently ransack my room for contraband like home-made dresses and gender-affirming undergarments, and punish me by forcing me to the ground, removing my clothes, and smacking the shit out of my bare hide. I spent nights alternating between pleading that God would not strike me dead for my attraction to men, and praying that he would show mercy and strike me down so I would not have to face another day.
I spent the rest of that class with my eyes on the floor, and once again prayed that night for both forgiveness and my own death.
In an alternate universe, none of that would have happened. I would have been raised in a church which affirmed my gender and sexuality, as many progressive Christian denominations do today. Perhaps I would have gone to seminary, found a Biblical background for my own queerness, and dedicated my life to preaching of the Good News of Christ Jesus instead of being the storyteller-errant I am in this one.
Perhaps, in that alternate universe, I would have known love. That universe would have required Doctor James Dobson to have never existed.
In this one, after eighty-nine years of preaching violence, abuse, and hatred, James Dobson is finally fucking dead.
II.
It is worth noting that the “Doctor” in Dobson’s title comes from a degree in child psychology and not theology, despite primarily being known for his work in leading the Evangelical Christian organization Focus On The Family, and despite being utterly unqualified to be around children at all. He was a member of the American Psychological Association until 1973, when he resigned in disgust over the removal of homosexuality’s classification as a mental illness. He left the field to focus on his ministry at Focus in 1976.
That so-called ministry claims to promote the nebulous and glorified concept of the “Christian Family”, while the meat of his work destroyed thousands of real life families and childhoods in the process. He is best known for two points of advocacy on behalf of the Christian way of life: defending child-beating and eradicating queer folk from public life. This is not exaggeration or extrapolation. His published works speak for themselves, and they also form a disproportionate portion of the modern Evangelical right-wing canon.
His most famous work, 1970’s Dare To Discipline, stands as both his entry into the public consciousness and as an early salvo of his views. It endorses hitting toddlers as young as two and three years old (pg. 40 & 41, et al)*. It praises trauma bonding–which is classified as a form of abuse by many actual practicing psychologists, for the record–as a genuine expression of parental love (ch.1 p.2, pg. 23), bemoans the lack of stick-beatings in the classroom (ch. 3, pg.81) and spends a good deal of a book on raising children decrying the ACLU (pg. 87), the agency of women (pg. 39 & 40, et al), birth control (pg. 146), and most if not all expressions of human sexuality (ch. 5).
A follow-up, 1978’s The Strong Willed Child, begins by recounting a time he beat the shit out of his dog (p. 11-14) and goes on to extol the virtues of doing the same to children.
Eventually, he turned his and his organization’s focus away from child psychology and towards their new favorite punching bag; gay folk. Dobson and his cohorts at the Council Of National Policy were instrumental in beating the drum of homophobic sentiment that culminated in Reagan’s genocidal handling of the AIDS Crisis in the ’80s. He kept at it from there, publishing Marriage Under Fire in 2004 in which he compared the push towards legalizing gay marriage to appeasing Hitler (p.29-30) and penning an article in 2016 imploring husbands to shoot trans women who try to use the bathroom.
Entire novels have been written on the harm Dobson has done; Focus co-founder Gil Alexander-Moegerle’s 1977 tell-all James Dobson’s War on America is one of the better ones. Honestly, though, his Wikipedia page (especially the section on his Ted Bundy interview, where Dobson showed more grace and compassion towards a serial killer than he ever did queer folk) and the Southern Policy Law Center’s page on Focus On The Family are both more damning in their brevity than anything I could pen at length.
One irony is, despite what Focus On The Family’s PR agencies would have you believe, his tireless advocacy for the Christian Family may have harmed Christianity’s image and its hold on America as well. It isn’t hard to find evidence that support for Evangelical Christianity in America has been in decline for a while now, with church attendance numbers leveling off recently after a consistent decline.A record number of religious Americans have stated that gay folk should be accepted by society.
It is also not particularly difficult to find child abuse victims like myself whose abusers looked to Dobson for justification or guidance, or queer ex Evangelical folk irrevocably harmed by his advocacy for conversion therapy or by his ex-gay organization Love Won Out. Nor is it particularly difficult to find entire threads of people and better-written articles than mine celebrating his death and commiserating about the damage he did in the name of Christian “love”. A name-search for Dobson on Bluesky right now gives thousands of results,
including some from my own account. Nearly all of the results are pissing on his grave.
Every ounce of piss on that granite gender-neutral urinal is utterly deserved.
III.
I will close this with another personal anecdote. You’ll have to excuse my terrible manners, I’m not above ruining a fascist’s funeral.
It is the mid-aughts. I am still in middle school. My adoptive parents have brought me to a Christian counselor, most likely because my previous therapist did such terrible things as “played chess with me to get me to talk”, “told them not to yell at me as much”, and “suggested knocking me around a bit less.”
I remember the counselor asking me about my adoptive parents. I remember him listening intently to how much I wished they wouldn’t scream at me, wouldn’t hit me, wouldn’t refuse to let me leave the house. I remember mentioning that the front door of the house deadbolted from the inside, remember mentioning the room raids. I also remember deciding not to mention my growing discomfort with the changes puberty was making on my body, my disgust with my physical form, my struggles with my sexuality. This was probably for the best.
He let me talk for a while, listening to me telling him all about these horrible things that went on at home.
Then he brought my adoptive mother in.
A dark, violent grin spread across her face as he told her everything I had just told him, nearly word for word. He turned to me, and said that everything she did was justified. I was strong willed, you see. Obstinate. I needed to submit to her and my adoptive father’s authority. It was for my own good. They punished me in this way because they loved me, and because it was the Christian way of teaching me good morals. I needed to be beaten, to learn my place.
Re-reading Dare To Discipline for this article, as well as multiple other works of Dobson’s, I am realizing that much of what that counselor said to justify the abuse I endured was ripped straight from the pages of Dobson’s books.
I will not tell you what happened later that night. You can probably piece it together.
I will, however, tell you this.
I do not believe in an afterlife. Certainly not the Christian one; not after the childhood I had, thanks in no small part to the good doctor’s teachings. I do not know what awaits us after death. And frankly, I do not care.
But, if the gods do exist, and they are just, James Dobson is in hell.
*Page numbers from the 1977 Bantam re-publication, not the later reprints or The New Dare To Discipline in this section.
Piper Bly is a professional illustrator and underground cartoonist. When she’s not busy plowing away at her drawing board, singing dirges in the moonlight, or wandering throughout the United States, she can often be found tending to her ivies, frying up some biscuits, spending unreasonable hours in the gym, or floating above the Mississippi River at midnight, waiting for the tide to wrap her in its loving embrace and take her away. Her whereabouts are currently undisclosed. You, however, can find her at piperbly.com.