Focus on the Family founder James Dobson continued his campaign to ensure that conservative Christians ignore Republican failures and scandals and turn out to vote next month, holding his third “Stand for the Family” rally in Nashville, Tennessee, where the race to replace retiring Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is neck and neck. Previous rallies were held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The rally in Nashville, held at the same church that hosted “Justice Sunday II” last year, informed the audience that there is “a nationwide effort to suppress their vote,” according to Baptist Press News, and Dobson said that “they” were behind it:
“What Mark Foley did was unconscionable. It was terrible,” Dobson said. “… Thankfully he’s gone. But tell me — now that he’s gone, why is it still with us? Why are they still talking about it? Why are they trying to blame somebody for it? It is because they are using that to suppress the values voters.”
Dobson said he was told that additional news about “outed gay” Republicans may come out in coming weeks.
“They’re dribbling this bad news out so that eventually the values voters will get to the place that they say, ‘A pox on both your houses. I’m staying home.’ Folks, we cannot afford to do that,” Dobson said.
Who are “they”? Southern Baptist leader Richard Land blamed the “liberal media,” which he said “has abandoned any semblance of objectivity … to launch an all-out attack on values voters and on the candidates of values voters to seek to suppress our vote.” (In any event, Dobson’s attempt to pin poor poll results for Republicans on “outed gays” does not accord with voter trends, as shown in a recent Center for American Values survey.)
As a motivating factor, Dobson also claimed to have inside information that two Supreme Court justices may retire soon:
“I am told by people who know far more about it than I do that there are probably two … Supreme Court justices who are hanging on until there is a more liberal Senate so that their seat will not be taken by somebody who is conservative,” Dobson said. “It’s a 5-4 [pro-choice] court right now. One more new justice — if they are conservative — will put Roe v. Wade in jeopardy.”
