James Dobson: "loony religious right freak"

Jeremy Pierce has an excellent post about James Dobson and Focus on the Family, and the recent hullabaloo about Spongebob, which I mentioned Friday. FOTF is often discussed and ridiculed in my blog -- it's nice to hear a Christian take them to task for pretty much the same reasons I do. Jeremy continues with nice some discussion of religion and conservative politics in general. An excerpt:

When Jerry Falwell went off against the Teletubbies, most evangelical Christians I knew laughed at him and thought he was being ridiculous. There's no way he represented the average evangelical in the 1980s, never mind now. Dobson is another story. His organization has been one of the most influential groups in the area they've been specialists in. When it comes to good childrearing practices, they've done a great service to Christians and have had a big impact. That's why this distresses me so much. What's worse is that they're in the process of engineering the defeat of all the people they've worked so hard to get elected. This just makes conservatives look dumb. I know there are many other factors why Clinton won in 1992, not the least being that his opponent wasn't willing to campaign or seriously defend himself against Democrats' charges, assuming another landslide win like the previous two elections. Still, one of the factors, I'm sure, was the loss of political capital among conservatives on social issues, largely due to nuts like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, who made two fatal mistakes. First, they equated Christianity with a political agenda that reflects part of the biblical perspective, overemphasizes some of the elements to the detriment of others, and actually contradicts biblical teaching in a few important places. Second, they simply made ludicrous claims about the intentions and effects of certain trends, events, and icons of popular culture, most notably their remarks about Barney and the Teletubbies.

Well worth a read.