On his radio show today, Focus on the Family's James Dobson announced that he would be on hand at The Call in San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium on Saturday as part of the last drive by anti-gay activists to rally support for California's Proposition 8, which, if passed, would amend the state's constitution to take away the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Dobson lives in Colorado, of course, but he believes the rejection of Proposition 8 will lead to the downfall of Western civilization, as he tearfully laid out on his radio program today. He interviewed Jim Garlow, a California pastor who has been at the forefront of organizing churches to get out the vote in support of Prop. 8. In today's USA Today, Garlow has an op-ed in which he piles on the fear, claiming that "Failure to preserve the definition of traditional marriage has resulted in profound losses of personal freedoms," and that "When same-sex relationships — especially marriage — acquire government sanction, anyone in opposition to it must be intimidated, silenced, fined, jailed or at least threatened."
A few months back, after asking a perfectly innocent reporter question of the spokesperson for the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) -- I wanted to know whether the "legal counsel" referred to on a public pro-Prop. 8 Web site was, in fact, the ADF -- someone accidentally copied me on a chain of e-mails between ADF, Garlow, and other Prop. 8 supporters. They feared that I would surreptitiously listen in on one of their strategy conference calls. One of the respondents in the e-mail thread wrote that the group "should not discuss campaign strategy, and that everyone should assume the conversation is recorded and accordingly avoid inflammatory rhetoric and gratuitous attacks." So, I wonder, if they're willing to make inflammatory and gratuitous claims like gay marriage will take the rights of Christians away in one of the most widely read newspapers in America, what might have someone said in that conference call that would have been off-limits?
Needless to say, I did not hack into their conference call, so I have no idea what was said there.
Back to Dobson: Garlow had requested Dobson's presence at The Call, part of a series of stadium events organized by evangelist Lou Engle, who worries about "Antichrist legislation" like the legalization of gay marriage. For more on Engle and The Call, and the Pentecostal-charismatic leader's growing clout in the religious right, check out this piece I wrote this week for Religion Dispatches, which details how Engle believes his movement of fasting, 24/7 prayer, and, as one follower told me, "continuously being bombarded by the preaching of the end-times" will change the outcome of the election.
How effective is his movement? Engle believes it turned the election in 2000 and 2004 for Bush, and that it resulted in the nomination of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court.
--Sarah Posner
