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fantastic lede from sam, and the rest of it ain’t too shabby either
JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children. He was defined by an unshakable belief that godly parents, governments, and churches could eradicate unacceptable kinds of people with the tactical application of beatings and shame. He leaves behind the destruction of families in the service of conformity to his personal vision of society.
ALT

‪CHOAM Nomsky‬
‪@samthielman.com‬
· 17h
This was like lancing a boil.

James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies
The radical cleric leaves behind a legacy of sanctified torture, destroyed children and broken families.
www.forever-wars.com
August 22, 2025 at 8:38 PM

CHOAM Nomsky
‪@samthielman.com‬
This was like lancing a boil.

James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies
The radical cleric leaves behind a legacy of sanctified torture, destroyed children and broken families.
www.forever-wars.com
August 22, 2025 at 1:57 PM

The War at Home
James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies

Sam Thielman
22 Aug 2025 • 10 min read

{snip}

JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children. He was defined by an unshakable belief that godly parents, governments, and churches could eradicate unacceptable kinds of people with the tactical application of beatings and shame. He leaves behind the destruction of families in the service of conformity to his personal vision of society.

With his popular jeremiads endorsing corporal punishment, his vicious crusade against women’s healthcare, his apologies for all manner of violence, and his network of anti-gay “conversion” ministries, Dobson rose to fame, fortune, and a political stature that got him access to presidents including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He pioneered a style of activism, always academic and religious in tone but unfettered by denominational structures or university norms, that used hundreds of millions of dollars from opaque donor-advised funds to unite the disparate factions of the nascent evangelical movement beginning in the early 1970’s. He and his imitators led American Christianity’s descent into a madness that has now spread through every level of society, producing misery, estrangement, and suicide.

Dobson’s legacy is complex. That's not because it is in any sense positive—it isn’t—but because its tentacles extend into so many areas of modern life. The beginning of his celebrity, though, is a clear starting point. It went like this: When Benjamin Spock emerged as a peace activist during the Vietnam War, Dobson published Dare to Discipline in 1970 as a response to Spock’s watershed parenting book Baby and Child Care. Spock, a laureled pediatrician, had said that children benefit from affection and consideration and were suffering from rigid toilet-training schedules and limited affection.* Dobson contended that children were born sinful and must be beaten without mercy in order to secure their bond to their parents and the church, and, of course, to save them not from germs, but from damnation.

Dobson’s own psychology was frankly sick. Near the beginning of “Dare to Discipline,” he writes:

{snip}