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Travel and Religion
In which I once again object to certain rhetoric

In which I once again object to certain rhetoric

Last updated on: August 23, 2025 at 9:05 pm by Dan Peterson

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In which I once again object to certain rhetoric 2025-08-23T21:05:45-06:00 Dan Peterson

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In Colorado Springs, to which James Dobson moved his organizations from California.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

On Wednesday last, I posted a blog entry (“On Dealing With “Scum” Who’ve Entered Our Country Illegally”) in which I took issue with an ostensible Latter-day Saint over at the “LDS Freedom Forum” who calls himself “Fred.” I objected to his use of such terms as scum to refer to illegal immigrants to the United States. I’ve since learned that “Fred” has also used words like monkoids and chimps for people who don’t share his particular skin pigmentation, and that he seems to be an unabashed white supremacist.

I’ve wondered how “Fred” can claim to be a Latter-day Saint with such attitudes. And, in fact and perhaps even somewhat to my relief — and, yes, I’m struggling with that feeling — he may no longer be an active or believing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: He seems to be upset with the current leadership of the Church for, among other things, their having received the “death jab” during the COVID pandemic. (Pretty predictable, that: There’s now a crazy “right wing” offramp out of the Restored Church that’s comparable to the left wing offramp with which we’ve been all too familiar for a long time. It puts me in mind of something that Elder Neal A. Maxwell liked to quote from the dissenting English clergyman William Law [1686-1761]: “If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God first, it will in the end make no difference what you have chosen instead.” It also reminds me of the Lord’s statement, in Doctrine and Covenants 1:16, that “every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world.”)

Yesterday, Friday, I posted a blog entry entitled “I Can Easily Imagine Worse Deaths.” That blog post’s title was inspired by the title of a new Interpreter article that went up yesterday: “Death by Chocolate: Considering the Wine Imbibed by the Lamanite Guards.” I like chocolate. In all its forms. I began this morning, as I often do, with a chocolate breakfast drink. And, as it happens, I had a bit of a really good Mexican chocolate mole meat dish last night for dinner. During my mission in Switzerland, I was sometimes literally like a kid in a candy shop. In yesterday’s blog entry, referring to the Interpreter article, I remarked that “I can think of far worse ways to die than by some form or other of chocolate.”

I also devoted a few lines in yesterday’s blog entry, though, to the language used by a poster over on the Peterson Obsession Board to rejoice at the death of the prominent Evangelical Protestant child psychologist James Dobson. “Dumb-Dud” pronounced Dr. Dobson a monster and hoped that he is now being tortured in Hell. Others there have since joined in to label Dobson “odious,” a “toad,” and “filth,” and, metaphorically, to invoke sexual violence upon him.

I never read any of Dr. Dobson’s books. I doubt that I’ve ever read more than a few paragraphs that he wrote. Over several years altogether, I heard perhaps thirty minutes of his radio programs. I didn’t follow him. Although I’m a political conservative — or, I would rather say, because I’m a political conservative — I don’t share his enthusiasm for a certain current president of the United States. But what little I heard from him always seemed pretty commonsensical and reasonable to me. For that reason, such responses to his passing as this from USA Today strike me as balanced and fairly accurate.

Perhaps, though, there was another side to him. In the past day or two, I’ve encountered some extraordinarily harsh things said about him, and seen a great deal of cruelty and abuse and loss of faith blamed on him. (See, for example, this lengthy and quite nasty piece from the “Friendly Atheist”: “James Dobson, an architect of evangelical Christian cruelty, is finally dead at 89: His toxic teachings on family, sex, and politics left generations scarred—and America worse off.” And this: “James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies: The radical cleric leaves behind a legacy of sanctified torture, destroyed children and broken families.”) Are those denunciations fair? I don’t know. I’m inclined to think not. They certainly don’t seem to fit the genial, kindly man that I heard on the radio. When I think of “radical clerics,” I think of people like Muqtada al-Sadr and Anjem Choudary, not of James Dobson.

Since Dr. Dobson’s death, though, I’ve run across some quoted advice from him that seems, well, genuinely strange and, in some cases, much more approving of corporal punishment than I’ve ever been. Are such specimens cherry-picked? Are they representative? I don’t know. As I say, I didn’t follow him.

I can think of only one occasion when I used physical punishment as a parent. It stands out in my memory because it was so unusual and because it made me distinctly unhappy. (It’s just not “me.” I don’t ever even raise my voice.) I was mowing the front lawn, and one of my sons, then quite young, was out there with me. Our suburban neighborhood street has a fair amount of traffic on it for such a quiet area and, on that day, there were many cars parked along the curb because our neighbors were having some sort of gathering, perhaps a barbecue, at their house. For some reason, my little boy began to be fascinated with darting out into the street from between the parked cars. I was terrified that he would be hit by a passing vehicle, so I told him to stop it. Repeatedly. Over and over again. Eventually, thinking that the threat would surely cause him to stop, I sternly told him that, if he did it even one more time, I would wallop his backside. I imagined that that would take care of the problem. But it didn’t. Almost immediately, he dashed between two parked cars into the street. Now I was faced with a dilemma. I didn’t really want to strike him. I’d never done so before. I wasn’t even really angry. I was just worried. I recall being surprised and distressed that, despite my stern warning, my son had put me into this situation. But, I reasoned, if I didn’t spank him after he had plainly gone against my clear warning, any future warnings from me would have diminished credibility. So I gave him a flat-handed spank on the rear, not really very hard, and sent him into the house. As he closed the door behind him, he called out that I was the worst Daddy ever. I was actually pretty saddened by that episode, but at least he wasn’t running out into the street any more.

So it’s not as if I’m a really enthusiastic fan of corporal punishment for children. I’m absolutely not. And I don’t think that I’ve ever called another human being “filth.” I’ve rarely called another human being a “monster.” When I have, I’ve reserved the term for people on the order of Jeffrey Dahmer.

And that points to the actual unifying theme of my Wednesday blog entry and my Friday blog entry: I like people. I disapprove of using words like filth and scum for other human beings. Dehumanizing language is sometimes a precursor to dehumanizing actions. Some good examples might be cited from 1930s Germany. I’ll offer just one: Adolf Hitler dismissed humankind as “a ridiculous cosmic bacterium” (ein lächerliches kosmisches Bakterium), and his political actions were consistent with that view.

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