Religious right leader James Dobson is ticked that lesbian vice presidential daughter Mary Cheney is having a baby with her lesbian partner. Dobson has a rather unique, and sexist, perspective on what mommies and daddies do for their children. From TIME:
According to educational psychologist Carol Gilligan, mothers tend to stress sympathy, grace and care to their children, while fathers accent justice, fairness and duty. Moms give a child a sense of hopefulness; dads provide a sense of right and wrong and its consequences. Other researchers have determined that boys are not born with an understanding of "maleness." They have to learn it, ideally from their fathers.And, as Joe has noted before, Dobson and the religious right Republicans are going to target "divorce" some day soon, outlawing it:
This is a lesson we should have learned from no-fault divorce. Because adults wanted to dissolve difficult marriages with fewer strings attached, reformers made it easier in the late 1960s to dissolve nuclear families. Though there are exceptions, the legacy of no-fault divorce is countless shattered lives within three generations, adversely affecting children's behavior, academic performance and mental and physical health. No-fault divorce reflected our selfish determination to do what was convenient for adults, and it has been, on balance, a disaster.He's also apparently in favor of women as chattel:
We should not enter into yet another untested and far-reaching social experiment, this one driven by the desires of same-sex couples to bear and raise children. The traditional family, supported by more than 5,000 years of human experience, is still the foundation on which the well-being of future generations depends.For 5,000 years, whites didn't marry blacks. For 5,000 years, Catholics didn't marry Jews. For 5,000 years, women were their husbands' property, unable to inherit, own, or do much of anything else except sit back and shut up. And for 5,000 years, the traditional family, from Egypt to America, owned black people as slaves. Tell me, oh tell me, why the last 5,000 years of misogyny, bigotry and miscegenation are the good old days?
The world would have been so better off had Strom Thurmond been elected president.
