What's Right About The Religious Right

What's Right about the Religious Right

Don't get me wrong. I am so far left, I turn the corner again to make sure. I think we have all heard me rant and rail against my fellow lefties for their lack of real unity. Books like Don't think of an Elephant and Rules for Radicals give me hope that some day we will be able to come together and make our voices heard. Until that time it would not hurt to look at the competition and their strategies. I want to focus on the religious right because what they have done should be raised to an art form and that statement is made dripping with disgust and awe.

The main subject of my paper will be James Dobson's pet organization, Focus on the Family. This organization has used easy and effective tactics to appeal to a staggering amount of people who apparently just want to be told what to think. By appealing to family values, religious beliefs and even patriotic duty, this organization has managed to create a following that is fiercely loyal and ready to burn books or condemn their neighbor faster than you can say "sacri-licious." And they are damned good at it.

There are few things as basic and revered (for the most part) as family. By nature humans are creatures of community. We are not born alone and we cannot learn without the thoughts and progress of our predecessors. Unfortunately we are also inclined to hang with people who are similar to us. Families tend to run in comparable circles and James Dobson takes advantage of that.

The name of his organization is Focus on the Family but the idea behind this organization seems to focus on a narrow definition of what a family is. This group has advice on how to deal with dissenting images of non-traditional families with data to back up any contradictory statistics. From their own website, http://www.family.org, they take on such pesky issues as cohabitation, divorce and the real role of a woman in a relationship and I submit this from the website, for your enjoyment, "This may be shocking news to you, but an overwhelming majority of wives in my survey said they want to submit to their husbands. They want their husbands to be the head of the home, and they have no desire to usurp that God-given position of leadership."

I cringed just cutting and pasting that. So we have a general template, albeit a very outdated one, for what the typical family is. Surprise, it's still the nuclear family. A strong father who is the head of the household, a meek and loyal wife and two point five kids. They are still preferably white, although they are doing some great advertising with the token culturally sterile minority group. That's for insurance, you know, in case that race war ever happens.

They appear inclusive by making this family look like the norm. This is easy to do because of the immense societal power of the elite for the prime era of this family ideal. This is great ammunition for the left. Whether people realize it or not, the nuclear family has not been the norm for a long time. If anything they are the freaks. Kudos to the family who can genuinely stay together because they can; for the rest of us, it is step fathers and mothers, half brothers and sisters and a biracial cornucopia of grandkids (ha, ha Strom Thurmond), not to mention gays and lesbians.

So how does the family stay together? They pray together. Focus on the family has come up with the perfect weapon for winning sympathy away from the liberal left; play the victim. They are religiously persecuted because Jesus is being ripped from the classroom. James "The Gambler" Dobson has managed to convince the people in his organization and countless others that an injustice has been committed because activist groups such as the ACLU are speaking on behalf of students who might not be Christian or even religious at all.

Again, here is another opportunity to turn the tables around. People are getting a spin that says that Christianity is being excluded instead of included with a host of other religions that have never set foot inside of a public school. This reaction is so surprising when there are passages in the bible that preach tolerance (hi, love thy neighbor). If they illustrate the fact that they can't say Christmas vacation anymore because the schools now say winter break, we can show the other side of that argument and acquaint people with the confused Jewish child who is bombarded by an obvious display of a preference for a religion other than his own.

It must be pointed out that the kind of people who are attracted to James Dobson's ideals may also be the kind that were attracted to such films as The Passion (they have a favorable FAQ about it on their webpage). Yes Jesus suffered and screenings were packed with people who felt that the message he had to preach was best received in one of the most violent and bloody scenes not found in a Freddy Kruger movie. Lefties can be religious too, but in a way that incorporates tolerance and really stands behind the intended message of Christ. Basically I think we can make this work for us, instead of against us.

Family and religion have been great bridges to the next tactic used by James Dobson and Focus on the Family--patriotism. Addressing his support to the war in Iraq, James Dobson says, "To my knowledge, the U.S. is the first country in history that had the world's most dominant military power, and yet did not use that hegemony to conquer, enslave, and plunder weaker nations." I take it his followers are not