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Fundies are okay with James Dobson bragging about animal cruelty--it explains their loyalty to Trump [1]

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Date: 2025-02-03

To my mind, the biggest reason Trump was even in a position to return to the White House had nothing to do with whether or not the Justice Department moved fast enough to indict him. I submit that Trump wouldn’t have even been in a position to run again if he didn’t know the religious right would be behind his candidacy come hell or high water. As most of us know, the nation’s so-called moral guardians threw their full weight behind Trump in 2016 even when it was amply established that he was a boor, a bully, a buffoon, and a gangster. And they continued backing him after the Jan. 6 insurrection and his absconding with classified documents added “traitor” to that list.

We know why they did so. Many of them, like Ralph Reed and Franklin Graham, openly admitted after the release of the “Access Hollywood” tapes that what really mattered to them, and their followers, was stacking the courts with line-drawing conservatives. We need only look at how the religious right went to the mattresses to ensure Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett got their black robes to see it.

But how did it happen? I suspect a large part of it has to do with the fact that they were already primed to support someone despite ample evidence that he was a really bad guy. After all, one of their major titans has remained so despite ample evidence that he is a really bad guy. Namely, James Dobson. In a post at my Substack, I note that Dobson opened one of his early books, The Strong-WIlled Child, with an account that any reasonable person would describe as an act of animal cruelty. And yet, he hasn’t gotten any blowback from it whatsoever—apparently because they don’t matter to his followers nearly as much as his arch-conservative views on child rearing.

Dobson begins The Strong-Willed Child by recounting how he took a belt to his 12-pound dachsund, Sigmund Freud—or “Siggie”—when he balked at going to bed. I only learned about this account in 2020, when I diaried about how “Dr. Dobson” told a battered spouse in another one of his early books that divorce wasn’t the answer to her years-long abusive marriage. When fellow Kossacks RhodeIslandAspie and Lex Lurker pointed me to a HuffPost article about this passage, I was stunned that this was allowed to make it to print. I was even more stunned to discover that this passage has remained unchanged through five editions, most recently in 2017. I mentioned it in a Community Contributor post the following year about the religious right being intoxicated on power, but felt in light of Trump’s return, it merited another look.

In my research for the Community Contributor post, I discovered that there is an Everest-sized mountain of evidence that cruelty to animals almost always leads to cruelty against people. It’s inconceivable that Dobson, his staffers, or his publishers at Tyndale House haven’t discovered this evidence in the 46-plus years since The Strong-Willed Child was published. When the best-case scenario is that they were disengaged in a way that a major evangelical personality and a major publisher cannot be, that’s bad, brother.

To be sure, Dobson’s argument that heavy-handed discipline is the best way to deal with kids who think, as the book’s summary puts it, that they can “live by their own rules” is backwards as all get out. But it says something that this is far less problematic than Dobson essentially bragging about animal cruelty. Secular books have been forced into major re-edits, if not pulped outright, for far less. In 2021, I mused that one big reason we haven’t seen something similar with Dobson is that his teachings struck a responsive chord with his readers.

That prospect was confirmed in my discussions with someone who was nursed in this world, Cindy Mallette. If that name sounds familiar, she was a prominent Tea Party activist in the early 2000s. However, in an op-ed that ran in Vox in 2019, she revealed that reading the Bible from cover to cover in 2015 began a journey that ultimately led her to hop the fence and become a Democrat in 2018. She told me that she now realized that she spent the first three-and-a-half decades of her life prioritizing “purity of belief over purity of faith”—a trait all too common in the conservative evangelical world. She believes that mentality has made evangelicals willing to “vote for the devil himself if he promised to end abortion.”

Suddenly, it makes sense. As long as your beliefs and teachings are considered correct in this world, it doesn’t matter if you’re a depraved jerk. Sound familiar? We’ve been told time and again that we don’t have to like Trump to like his policies. But are his policies so important that he must get a pass for behavior that would otherwise never be tolerated in any society? Apparently so. For instance, we’ve been told that the end of Roe v. Wade made Trump worth it. Uh huh. At the expense of a president who has degraded his office in a way most of us have never seen in our lifetimes?

For more, check out my Substack, Loud, Liberal, Christian. If it’s in your budget, get a paid subscription; it helps support my work.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/3/2301036/-Fundies-are-okay-with-James-Dobson-bragging-about-animal-cruelty-it-explains-their-loyalty-to-Trump?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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