Who Threaton Constitutional Freedoms!
Dobson’s manual, Dare to Discipline, read like a manifesto for domestic violence when it finally appeared in 1970. He urged parents to beat their young children, preferably with a “neutral object” such as a belt or a rod, lest they turn into drug-addled longhairs. He also advised administering a healthy spanking every now and again. “A little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child,” Dobson wrote. “However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms.” For parents struggling with children who refused to cooperate in public, Dobson recommended a slightly less vigorous technique than spanking. “There is a muscle, lying snuggly against the base of the neck [and] whenfirmly squeezed, it sends little messengers to the brain saying, ‘This hurts; avoid recurrence at all costs.’” Dobson instructed his readers to firmly pinch the necks not only of their own sons and daughters, but of the inadequately disciplined children of complete strangers as well. “It can be utilized in countless situations where face-to-face confrontations occur between child and adult,” Dobson said of his technique. To reinforce his advice, Dobson offered an anecdote that read as though it were lifted from the script of Dirty Harry (in which he used his strength to overpower a young teen who was attacking an older man.)
When Dobson updated his child-rearing advice in his 1992 manual The Strong-Willed Child, he extended his advocacy of corporal punishment to unruly household pets.
To Dobson, children were to be treated no differently than dogs. Both were preternaturally prone to rebellion, so both should be “crushed” with violent force.
By about this time, I felt sick to my stomach as I soon began to realize that this man was instigating violence within the home and without...in order to respond to authority/orders... And that he used the organization he led to send out letters that "told his family" how to vote... The story continued that this was about the time of the Kent State murders and a group of hard-hat rioters started a murderous riot which was later learned to be instigated by Nixon's special counsel, Colson...
Can we make a firm hypothesis that between 1970 and and around 2000, the indoctrination of violence rather than love to train our children had been firmly implemented in many homes across America.
By the summer of 1973, Colson was preparing for his trial for obstruction of justice. With the prosecution preparing its case against him and the press corps homing in on his role in the Watergate break-in, Colson knelt on the floor with his friend Raytheon CEO Tom Phillips. While Colson fought back tears in an embarrassed state of silence, Phillips prayed for his soul. Driving through Washington afterward, Colson suddenly began to cry “tears of release.”
“I repeated over and over the words, Take me . . . ” Colson wrote in his best-selling memoir, Born Again. “Something inside me was urging me to surrender.” Soon after, Colson sought out Dobson and Francis Schaeffer as prayer partners. When Colson finally came to Jesus, he became America’s best-known born-again Christian, lending exposure to a cultural phenomenon erupting below the radar of the mainstream press and secular America. In the Washington Post, columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman mocked his conversion as a cynical ploy, panning it as “a socially approved way of having a nervous breakdown.” While Colson appeared to remove himself from politics, he quietly planned a strategy to regain his former influence...
Of course, Colson may have indeed been changed... but he also then moved to regain his former influence and power... And, Colson went on to work within prisons for reform, based upon some promised instantaneous miracle... and his scifi book Gideon's Torch seens little more than a preliminary conceptual planning for the January 6th attack. Not surprisingly, Gideon’s Torch became a recruiting tool for those wishing to realize its fictional narrative. It has been excerpted at length on the website of the "Army of God," a radical anti-abortion group responsible for the killing and bombing of abortion providers.
When Dobson first entered public life, his understanding of politics was amateur at best. Colson became his counsel, providing him with high-level Republican contacts and help devising a strategy to transform his growing flock into an influential political bloc. Colson could never have fulfilled the strategy on his own. Indeed, no figure in the burgeoning evangelical movement shared Dobson’s psychological understanding of his audience on an intimate level. Only Dobson recognized events such as the hard-hat riot as integral parts of a gathering backlash against liberalism. His advocacy of corporal punishment was carefully intended to channel the violent backlash in the streets into a coherent grassroots movement with himself as its guru. Dobson’s teachings resonated on a profound level with the backlashers. By 1976, Dare to Discipline had been reprinted eighteen times and sold over a million copies. His success propelled him into the rapidly expanding evangelical broadcast industry. Dobson’s new radio show and ministry, "Focus on the Family," became immensely popular as well. Now, the followers eager to implement his harsh methods had grown into a belt-wielding army of millions. Corporal punishment was back with a vengeance.
Philip Greven, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a leading expert on Protestant religious thought, is one of the few researchers of American conservatism who has recognized the impact of corporal punishment on the sensibility of movement members. In his incisive book Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, Greven analyzed Dare to Discipline in detail, concluding that Dobson’s violent child-rearing methods served an underlying purpose, producing droves of activists embarked on an authoritarian mission. “The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children,” Greven wrote. “The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy, enforced order, and absolute authority—so evident in Germany earlier in this century and in the radical right in America today—are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world.”
While Dobson worked with the psychological issues of aggression and more, he twisted it into a period of "purity" during which any individual must reveal their deepest darkest secrets before they could become a "member" of his family... The problem with this was, of course, that there is a difficult, if not an impossible issue with both allowing violence to be the controlling factor while at the same time demanding a level of purity and submission to a dominant... Certainly, this was never what Jesus had ever asked of us, especially when He gave us Our Free Will...
Yet, the movement grew and grew and a future plan of action was installed: ... would stop gun control, outlaw abortion, limit the rights of homosexuals, curb contraception, end the constitutional separation of church and state, and adopt the Ten Commandments as guiding principles for public schools.”
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