Dr. Dobson's Fables

James Dobson accuses Barack Obama of distorting the bible.

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Mr. Dobson said Tuesday in one of the regular radio broadcasts for the group he leads, Focus on the Family.

“He’s some kind of biblical authority?” Mr. Dobson also asked.

Mr. Dobson’s remarks focused on a June 28, 2006, speech in which Mr. Obama, in Washington, mentioned passages from the Bible that he suggested were in conflict with present-day practices.

Referring to the book of Leviticus, those practices include stoning people for planting different crops next to each other. Dr. Dobson says those laws have been made irrelevant by the New Testament, yet oddly enough, the imprecations against homosexuality in the same book in the Old Testament are left intact and are used as weapons by people like James Dobson to demonize an entire class of citizens and deny them their Constitutional rights of equal justice under the law. And he has the chutzpah to accuse Barack Obama of having a "fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution." Hey, he's the one who said "fruitcake."

As Fallenmonk notes, Dr. Dobson mocks Barack Obama's interpretation of the bible by questioning his theological bona fides. It turns out that James Dobson's scholarship in the bible is probably just as deep as any other lay person who's read that cobbled-together collection of myths, fables, and poetry:

I am not a reverend. I’m not a minister. I’m not a theologian. I’m not an evangelist. I’m a psychologist. I have a Ph.D. in Child Development from the University of Southern California.

Which means he has as much authority to speak out on the bible as I do, seeing as how I have a Ph.D. in playwriting and dramatic criticism from the University of Colorado. Actually, I'm probably better equipped to do it since I actually took classes and wrote papers on interpreting Elizabethan literature such as Shakespeare and the King James version of the bible. So why haven't I parlayed that degree into a multi-million dollar operation to fleece the gullible, the foolish, and the weak? Because of all the things I read in the bible, the one that stuck with me was Christ's admonishment to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. I guess Dr. Dobson missed that one.

(Cross-posted.)