Dobson’s Little List

Posted on August 11, 2005 in Hatred Sexuality

What will James Dobson think of next? Peter Stone of the Huffington Post uncovered a new manual put out by Focus-on-The-Family (And-Fuck-It-Up-Good) that tells concerned parents the seven deadly signs that their boy might be gay. Here they are with Peter’s marginalia:

1) Your boy has a strong feeling he is “different from other boys.” As we all know, boys must feel exactly like all other boys, or else they are clearly homosexual.

2) “A tendency to cry easily, be less athletic, and dislike the roughhousing that other boys enjoy.” Of course, on a relative scale, some boys are bound to be less athletic than others. Well, sorry. These boys are gay.

3) “A persistent preference to play female roles in make-believe play.” When you see him play cowboys and Indians, and he wants to be the squaw… uh, oh.

4) “A strong preference to spend time in the company of girls and participate in their games and other pastimes.” For example, boys must never play with their sisters. Isn’t that the leading cause of homosexuality right there?

5) “A susceptibility to be bullied by other boys, who may tease them unmercifully and call them ‘queer,’ ‘fag’ and ‘gay.'” Yes, parents, if the kid next door calls your son a fag, then he is. Four year-old neighbors have a sixth sense: They see gay people.

6) “A tendency to walk, talk, dress and even ‘think’ effeminately.” Effeminate thinking is destroying our nation; someone better tell Condoleeza Rice.

7). “A repeatedly stated desire to be — or insistence that he is — a girl.” This is the clearest sign. Apparently, your young homosexual will actually announce his sexual orientation by telling you, while drinking his juicy-juice, that he is actually a girl. Not a gay. A girl.

When I looked over my own life, I checked numbers 1, 2, and 5. And I ended up in a series of heterosexual relationships. I like women both as friends and sexually. Perhaps in me Dobson has discovered a special breed of homosexual?

Let me tell you the truth. I feel that I have been suffering from bipolar disorder since about the Second Grade. I felt different from other boys because of the strong emotions that made my brain swish like the inside of a washing machine doing a week’s worth of jockey shorts and pantie hose. I cried for no apparent reason at times and I was afraid of other boys. Didn’t care much for sports because they were too rigid and structured for me. (I didn’t mind soccer because you didn’t spend a lot of time warming the bench as you did in baseball or softball.) Later, as my asthma developed, I couldn’t participate as much. Plus I would get this pound pound pound in my head and just wear out faster. (This was only last year identified as a narrowing in the coronary artery.) Other boys, being jerks, bullied me. You see, what Dobson says is nothing more than the same kind of folk theorizing that has been going on for generations. He’s different. He must be a queer. They told my mother that and my mother followed Dobson’s rule: she treated me as a queer who must be broken. She called me “secretive”. I was. I wanted her out of my hair and out of my life. (I dreamed about that last night. In the dream, I was so angry with my parents, I was willing to rent a $1 room in a shelter.) I had a rich inner life and it was simply no one’s business what went on there. Like many heterosexual boys, I had a prolific erotic fantasy life. But it was not for her to know. She’d lost her right because she believed the word of others over mine. Plus she refused to take me to a therapist or a psychiatrist because she was afraid that they’d learn of the physical and emotional abuse that she and the other members of my family inflicted on me.

Persecution did this for me: First, it helped me establish my own independently governed course as a heterosexual. Second, it caused me to realize how poorly treated gays and lesbians were, so I championed their cause.

No one can put me through Dobson’s wringer now. Someone, however, should put James Dobson into the hands of a competent psychiatrist — not one of the “Christian” pretenders that many churches now front as “counselors”. (I know of one who told a bipolar woman fresh from a suicide attempt that she was an “evil woman” and did it to “abandon her children”. Deep insight there from an accredited veteranarian.) Focus on the Family is, incidentally, listed as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center. This blind thrashing about in search of homosexuals not only hurts gays but also kids who are like I was — suffering from a mental illness or just setting their own course.

Thanks to Theo for the link.