James Dobson and His Eugenic Mentor : An Intimation of the Antichrist

I am an advocate for Christians calling the Antichrist what it is in all its Mammonist, materialist vulgarity.  For the past thirty years the corporate media mounted a campaign to define "Christianity" as being the far right's heretical "Christianity" with a pantomime Jesus but without Jesus. A Christianity which did to the least among us the worst things it could possibly imagine, who did unto others the opposite of what they demanded be done for them, who blasted the peacemakers, who robbed the widow of her mite and kept it for themselves and their patrons and who, to put it plainly, violated every commandment Jesus ever issued.   Their great and only moral concern is the sex lives of other consenting adults who want to live as regular a life as possible.  These days almost exclusively lesbian and gay poeple getting all of their attention.  The reason for that is the same reason their ancestors in pseudo-Christian hatred targeted Jews, Black People, members of other minorities (who are still targeted but who aren't as acceptably targeted overtly as in the past) there is nothing that rallies The Antichrist, the opposite of what was taught in The Gospels, like the opposite of that message, love.  Hate is what the "christian" right feeds on, its rallying point and the underlying message of its slogans.

Over the weekend this story came out about one of the major figures in the pseudo-christian hate movement, James Dobson, issued one of his pseudo-christian fatwas on the topic of gay marriage.  I am sure you don't need to have me repeat what he said.   I interpret it as him advocating a violent response to the possibility of the Supreme Court ruling, again,  in favor of marriage equality, no less than some Islamic fundamentalist who might call for violence in exactly the same way, though with less of a coward's wink and nod disclaimer of not having done what he so obviously just did.

That James Dobson is being successfully put forward as some staunch defender of marriage rights is especially bizarre considering his history, him getting his start in the marriage business under Paul Popenoe, one of the major figures in American eugenics, a man who praised the Nazis eugenics program, the one that was geared towards the eventual murdering of the "unfit" and then others deemed biologically undesirable, a road that it was clearly on at the time Popenoe praised Hitler and the Nazis*.

Dobson was Popenoe's assistant after the Second World War and the revelation of the genocides and mass murders of Popenoe's heroes made it necessary for him to drop overt mention of eugenics.  Popenoe, though, who had gotten his big start in journalism, was able to repackage himself, concentrating on his other role as a self-created expert in marriage counseling.  After the war, he co-founded The Ladies' Home Journal and wrote its most popular column, the tacky "Can This Marriage Be Saved?"   He was also promoted by the Republican media hack Art Linkletter on the new medium of TV.  Being an overtly cited inspiration of Nazi eugenics didn't seem to catch up with him.  Such were the conditions of the post-war "free press".[See the link in the footnote]  As a eugenicist, marriage and ideas of what a "healthy marriage" were central to his campaign, as, indeed, it was the Nazi's.    As you can read in this description of a book he published almost ninety years ago, Dobson learned a lot from his mentor.

In his 1926 book The Conservation of the Family, Popenoe had claimed that "the" family is the oldest human institution in existence, having persisted unchanged for the past 500,000 years and that "the normal family is the only effective school for the life of the citizen."  It is this "normal" family, of course, not just any family, that would become the focal point for a retooled eugenics after the Holocaust.  Not the Nordic Race but the Normal Family must be protected from the evil forces that endanger it -- for example, feminists or, in Popenoe's terms, "oversexed and incontinent young spinsters and divorcees" and "undersexed, celibate spinsters of older age, all of whom, under the banner of individualism, are destroying the machinery of society".   And of course the Normal Family must be protected from the champions of birth control.  "Continued limitation of offspring of the white race simply invites the black, brown, and yellow races to finish the work already begun by Birth Control, and reduce the whites to a subject race preserved mainly for the sake of its technical skills, as the Greeks were by the Romans".   There was only one good thing about the feminist movement.   There was only one good thing about the feminist movement,  Popenoe thought:  It encouraged women "lacking in normal sexual instincts, or who may even have the instincts of the opposite sex"  to avoid marriage,  "for should they have children they might pass on their own abnormal constitutions".   About birth the control movement, however, he had nothing good to say.  To Popenoe, protecting the family meant eradicating feminism and homosexuality altogether and keeping birth control information, devices, and procedures safely in the hands of eugenic-minded physicians and officers of the sates.  His basic position remained unchanged from 1926, when he published Conservation of the Family, through 1977 when he campaigned to curtail civil rights for homosexuals in California.

Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy
By Ladelle McWhorter  Indiana University Press, 2009

Clearly, Dobson, who these days tries to distance himself from the eugenics content of his formation as a, um, "professional"  hasn't left his eugenicist mentor behind,  Here's a passage from Dobson's "Love for a Lifetime".

Let's look, then, at some of the ways masculinity differers from femininity.  Even by this cursory examination, perhaps we can obtain a greater appreciation for the unique and wonderful way we are made.   The late Dr. Paul Popenoe [ Popenoe never had more than an honorary doctorate], founder of the American Institute for Family relations in Los Angeles, wrote a brief article on the physiological differences between the sexes.  Perhaps it would be helpful to quote room the article, entitled "Are Women Really Different?"

"One of the least acceptable parts of the Women's Lib and related movements is the attempt to minimize the differences between the sexes.  The main thrust of their debate, or more correctly their assertions, is that such differences as exist are merely the result of differences in education and training, and therefore not basic..."

I will leave it to you if you're curious to look at the rest of it which I'm sure you'll be able to guess at even if you don't look at it.  Here's a hint, menstruation is mentioned.

One of the interesting sidelines to this is that Popenoe was, apparently according to his son, a "secular humanist" and not religious.  Or at least that's the word on the web.  I haven't looked it up so I'm just sayin'.


*  Here, from "The German Sterilization Law," by Paul Popenoe, Journal of Heredity (vol. 25) 1934

Probably his [Hitler's] earlier thinking was colored by Nietzsche, but he studied the subject more thoroughly during his years in prison, following the abortive revolutionary movement of 1923. Here, it is said, he came into possession of the two-volume text on heredity and eugenics, by E. Baur, E. Fischer, and F. Lenz, which is the best-known statement of eugenics in the German language, and evidently studied it to good purpose. In his book, Mein Kampf, most of which was written during these prison years, and which outlines most of the policies since adopted by the Nazis as a political party, he bases his hopes of national regeneration solidly on the application of biological principles to human society. "He who is not sound and worthy in body and mind, should not perpetuate his handicaps in the bodies of his children," Hitler declares in this book. "The state must take care that only he who is sound shall be a parent. "To prevent defective persons from producing equally defective offspring, is an act dictated by the clearest light of reason. Its carrying out is the most human act of mankind. It would prevent the unmerited suffering of millions of persons, and above all would, in the end, result in a steady increase in human welfare." That he has no illusions about producing immediate and miraculous results, but is taking the long time view, is evidenced by his remark that "If for only 600 years the reproduction of the physically defective and mentally diseased were prevented, not only would mankind be freed from an unmeasurable misery, but it would reach a vigor which today is hardly dreamed of. "In an age when races are poisoning themselves," he concludes, "any state which devotes itself to the care of its best racial elements must some day dominate the earth." He recognizes, however, that negative measures are not enough to safeguard the racial values of a people. 

As I pointed out in an earlier post about him, Popenoe probably saw his plugging Baur, Fischer and Lenz's book, which Hitler learned so much from as a polite courtesy as they cite Popenoes' writing in that book.