James Dobson appeared on “Hannity” last night to refute the notion that he had conceded defeat in the culture war, declaring that he had done nothing of the sort and that the “war is not lost.”
Dobson asserted that, while he had stepped down as Chairman of the Board at Focus on the Family, he has not retired and that he is working as hard as ever to press his agenda. He blasted the media for writing his movement off and for misrepresenting his original statement in order to marginalize them before vowing to keep up the fight:
The left wing media is itching for members of the pro family movement to put up white flag and declare the culture war over and to just hand the country to them and so they will take a statement like that, which was made to my staff - it was not a press release or anything like that - it was made the staff in reference to the election. And it is true that many of the battles that we have fought for many years were lost - at least the battles were lost, the war was not lost. And what the media, starting with The Telegraph, a British paper, had taken that and remove the last sentence … I mean they just flat out edited it which said, and you and I think you can quote a better than I because you have it in front of you, but it said “but we’re not going to give up, we're not going to stop, we’re going to continue to fight, right?" And the staff cheered. And that's what we're gonna do - we're not going anywhere.
Dobson insisted that his admission that “that we have lost all those battles” was in reference to his work in the 1980s fighting pornography and not necessarily to the culture war as a whole and that the “discouraging period” to which he was referring was in relation to the recent election but that they will make a comeback:
It would not be accurate not to admit that we lost the White House, we lost the House, and we lost the Senate, and we probably will loose in the courts, and we lost almost every department of government with this election. But the war is not over - pendulums swing and we'll come back. We're gonna hang in there and, you know, it's not going to be a surrender.
The belief that the Religious Right was going to regain its clout and prominence took up the remainder of the segment, with Dobson taking solace in the fact that 58 million Americans did not vote for Barack Obama and in signs that Obama’s approval rating is dropping, saying he did not believe that there had been a “been that great a shift among the American people”
Citing a variety of potential issues, such as the conscience clause and FOCA, Dobson admitted that “this is a discouraging time” and that some of the recent developments are “very, very troubling” but said that “we believe they’re temporary” and that “in tough times good people hang in there and wait for things to change and we pray a lot."
In the end, he declared that, as Christians, “we are not called to be successful; we're called to be faithful and that's what we plan to do."
