The right's point man
in America's culture war

Meetings with Bush
Dobson has met with President Bush more than once, though not at the ministry itself. Asked about the relationship between Focus on the Family and the White House, Focus officials said they participate in occasional conference calls.

“It’s not President Bush,” said Tom Minnery, the group’s vice president of public policy. “It’s not even Karl Rove. It’s lower-level people.”

Dobson himself offers restrained praise: He said Bush has always made the right decisions on issues like stem cell research, gay marriage and lower taxes. However, Dobson said he wishes Bush would speak more often and more directly to issues conservative Christians hold dear.

“I think he has kept his campaign promises,” he said. “Has he articulated them the way a lot of us would want him to? No. But I think that’s not in his nature.”

Dobson was in Washington last week for meetings he would not detail, though the battle over Bush’s judicial nominees figured to be a prime topic. Like others, Dobson believes the fight will reach a boiling point over a conservative Supreme Court nominee.

He ridiculed a March ruling that outlawed the death penalty for juvenile criminals in which Justice Anthony Kennedy acknowledged “overwhelming” international opinion against the practice. Dobson said that sort of shift by the court amounts to “grounds for impeachment.”

One side in the culture war
He also noted a growing divide between secular and religious America.

“(The nation) is polarized, no question about that, and I wish it were not that way,” he said. “But we’ve been in a culture war for a long time and it has become more intense in recent years. That’s what people are seeing and sensing and feeling. There is so much at stake now.”

He sees it as a battle for “the hearts and minds of the nation” between traditional values and liberals who believe in bigger government, abortion rights “and some of the more radical perspectives of the feminist movement.”

“The people of the left would say we’re extremist,” he said. “The truth of the matter is there is a tremendous population out there of people who care about their children, they care about their families, they care about their children’s schools, they care about morality.

“They are right now very, very concerned about the intrusion of popular culture into their families, especially into the lives of their children.”

Dobson, a member of the Church of the Nazarene, said his organization exists not to create an empire but for those who are frustrated with the culture’s direction. He says it’s that, rather than his political clout, that most people stop him on the street to talk about.

“What they typically say is, you helped me raise my kids,” he said. “Most of them say you were there when we were going through a really tough time. And some of them cry and some of them hug me. That is the essence of Focus on the Family.”

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