Religion & Law

Hello All,

I'm sympathetic to much of what Rob says in the post immediately below, but offer one mitigating consideration that might render the protest against CBS's decision a wee bit less depressing: It is possible that those protesting the planned ad are as concerned about the source of the ad as they are about its content.  I used, in the early 1990s, to listen to Dr. Dobson's radio programs with some regularity, and was impressed at the time by their charitable tones and evident sincerity in proclaiming the aim to provide succour and healing to all who voluntarily sought it.  But as that decade wore on, Dr. Dobson's messages and his involvement in American politics took on what in my view was a decidedly darker cast, filled with hard-hearted imprecations and paranoic likenings of Democratic political figures to servants of Satan.  And this is not even to mention the tendency I began to notice, as the decade wore on, for Dr. Dobson's programs to cast women in subordinate, 'follower' roles in relation to men.  I ceased listening altogether in disgust by the late 1990s.  Dr. Dobson's role in our polity has, it seems to me, become only more distasteful and uncharitable since the late 1990s, and it might well be that shared impressions of this sort account at least in part for the current protests against CBS's decision.  A helpful experiment would be presented us were Catholic Charities or, better yet, a group of women religious and/or the Catholic Worker movment to attempt to run a similar ad.  Were the protests to be the same in such case, I'd be a bit more able to join Rob in his depression.

Keep heart!,

Bob