James Dobson, the founder of the Christian anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups Focus on the Family (FOF) and the Family Research Council (FRC), has died at the age of 89. Hailed as one of “the most influential evangelical leader[s] in America,” he considered same-sex marriage worse than terrorism and encouraged men to murder trans women.

Born in 1936 to a fundamentalist minister father in Shreveport, Louisiana, Dobson graduated with a doctoral degree in psychology from the University of Southern California in 1967, and gained notoriety in 1970 by writing Dare to Discipline, a book that urged parents to use corporeal punishment to “break the will” of their children; his book also encouraged parents to hit their kids more if they cried for longer than five minutes after their initial beating.

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I was once an architect of the Christian nationalist agenda. I regret it all.

He founded FOF in 1977 and the FRC in 1981, two groups that specifically targeted feminists and gay people. FRC successfully championed the 1992 passage of Colorado’s Amendment 2, a ballot measure that forbade municipalities from passing anti-discrimination measures to protect gay and bi people.

Dobson also co-founded the Christian Nationalist legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom in 1993 — the group has successfully overturned the national right to an abortion and opposes any expansion of LGBTQ+ civil rights. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dobson and his network of evangelical conservative activists helped pass numerous state-level bans on same-sex marriage.

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By November 2004, Slate.com called Dobson “America’s most influential evangelical leader,” comparing him with the massively powerful anti-LGBTQ+ pastors Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. In 2010, Dobson launched Family Talk Radio, which aired on over 1,500 stations worldwide. Dobson also served as an adviser to five Republican presidents, including Donald Trump.

Dobson said women are hormonally predisposed to stay at home and raise children. He said women should use sex to gain the protection of men and use romance to civilize men’s destructive and lustful impulses. He also said feminists threaten society because they question men’s natural leadership.

Dobson and his groups promoted conversion therapy, the widely debunked, pseudoscientific practice that purports to change people’s sexual orientation and gender identity.

Dobson opposed pro-trans public accommodation laws because, he said, “every woman and little girl will have to fear that a predator, bisexual, cross-dresser, or even a homosexual or heterosexual male might walk in and relieve himself in their presence.” He compared proponents of same-sex marriage to Nazis who want “the utter destruction of the family.” He also said same-sex marriage would destroy the Earth.

In 2005, Dobson said that tolerance and diversity are “buzzwords” used in a “hidden agenda” to promote homosexual propaganda to children.

In 2015, Dobson said that the “B” in LGBTQ+ stands for “orgies” because bisexual people want to have sex with everybody. Dobson warned that legalizing same-sex marriage would result in civil war, fathers marrying their daughters, and men marrying donkeys.

In 2016, he said that men should murder trans women who use women’s restrooms.

In 2017, he signed the Nashville Statement, an evangelical statement on sexuality and gender that called it “sinful” and anti-Christian “to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism.”

In 2019, Dobson incited fear around the Equality Act, a federal bill to prohibit anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination. Dobson said the act represents “one of the most egregious assaults on religious liberty ever foisted on the people of this great nation,” and claimed that LGBTQ+ people and Democrats would “enslave” Christians if the act became law.

That same year, he claimed that mass shootings at schools and businesses occur because “the LGBTQ movement is closing in on the God-inspired and established institution of the family.”

In June 2020, Dobson declared the Supreme Court ruling that protected people from discrimination in employment due to gender and sexuality “an affront against God” and “a historical attack against the founding framework that governs our nation.”

Dobson’s group, FOF, has called the LGBTQ+ rights movement a “particularly evil lie of Satan.”

FOF said the “homosexual movement’s” goals include “universal acceptance of the gay lifestyle, the discrediting of Scriptures that condemn homosexuality, muzzling of the clergy and Christian media, granting special privileges and rights in the law, overturning laws prohibiting pedophilia, indoctrination of children and future generations through public education, and securing all the legal benefits of marriage for any two or more people who claim to have homosexual tendencies.”

The FRC has gone on to say that same-sex sexuality should be legislated and declared illegal and that “criminal sanctions against homosexual behavior” should be enforced. The group has argued that repealing the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy encourages the molestation of heterosexual service members.

The FRC has also dishonestly argued that “homosexual men are more likely to abuse children than straight men,” rhetoric that encourages violence against LGBTQ+ people and their allies. FRC leaders have said that the Bible commands Christians to kill gay people and that Christians should pray against any expansion of LGBTQ civil rights.

Evangelical groups and leaders associated with Dobson, FRC, and FOF have gone on to advocate for anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Africa, Europe, and East Asia.

In his 1997 book James Dobson’s War on America, former FoF executive Gil Alexander-Moegerle wrote, “James Dobson believes that he has been entirely sanctified, morally perfected, that he does not and cannot sin. Now you know why he and moralists like him make a life of condemning what he believes to be the sins of others. He is perfect.”

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