#602: Candi Cushman

Candi Cushman is what they call “an education analyst” at Focus on the Family (or its affiliate group, the Orwellianly named “True Tolerance”, which propagates the view that gays can and should be subjected to reparative therapy). The goals of Cushman and her organization is to defend the “innocence and purity” of children against LGBT groups that conspire “under the cover of so-called safe-school initiatives” and use “‘Safety’… as a political arm-twisting tool to force an adult agenda into schools.” It’s all about creating a safe environment for children in schools, therefore homosexuality must be vanquished.

Focus on the Family’s response to the Day of Silence is the Orwellian “Day of Dialogue”. Cushman said: “We're trying to raise awareness that more than one side needs to be heard on the issue of homosexuality, and we're helping to ensure Christian students have the chance to express their viewpoint. What is freedom of speech, after all, but a guarantee of the right to have dialogue?” (it isn’t – Cushman doesn’t have the right to have people listening to her.) Since Cushman and her ilk believes that homosexuality is a sin and gay people are going to burn in hell, the dialogue part may be deficient – “it’s time for an honest conversation about homosexuality” was one of the slogans, which is rather otherworldly; Judith Reisman had earlier claimed that the Day of Silence is a direct assault “on traditional parental, American values” and directly compared youth involvement in GLSEN (the organizers) with the Hitler Youth. Cushman has raged about “anti-bullying radicalism” and conspiracies as well, and she later slammed sex-ed for promoting respect for gay families (gay activists are apparently “infiltrating classrooms under the cover of anti-bullying”), characterizing it as “undemocratic” and dubbing bullying prevention “homosexuality promotion” (in line with the venerable word of wisdom “the only good homosexual is a dead homosexual,” apparently). According to Cushman the standards are designed by ”left-wing, casual-sex activist groups,” and are not intended to promote public health. Her evidence for this claim is that it is how she prefers to interpret it. Here is her more recent contribution to the Day of Silence efforts.

Along the same lines she has supported Focus on the Family’s opposition to the Banned Books Week because of its “promotion of homosexuality to … 6- or 7-year-old [children] against their will.” (But the Bible is apparently OK, at least.) She has also gone rabid over the children’s book “Tango for Three”, claiming that it is not a true story even though it demonstrably is.

Diagnosis: A fine example of purefied, raging bigotry, and the incoherent jumble that usually goes into rationalizing such positions. Truth and reason are probably a gay conspiracy anyways.

#589: Josh Craddock

Josh Craddock rose to fame when he, as a 19 year old student, got his first rant published in the WND. Unfortunately the rant didn’t really put Craddock in the best possible light. The contribution is discussed here. The screed in question was primarily a rant about how Focus on the Family and James Dobson have betrayed conservative Christian values and ”3,500 years of Judeo-Christian history” (over half the age of the earth!) by not being sufficiently anti-gay. I mean, officially Focus on the Family doesn’t want to throw gays in jail, and won’t deny them the right to hold public positions. Craddock’s article is also discussed here. Apart from that, Craddock is for the most part a rabid anti-abortionist who argues that Planned Parenthood and ”evolutionary racism” (i.e. eugenics) are two sides of the same coin.

Diagnosis: Full of youthful energy, and at the moment he is using it in the service of crazy. May still end up on the side of sanity, I suppose, but prospects seem currently rather bleak.

#107: James Dobson

Dobson runs the evangelical Christian organization Focus on the Family (although he has stepped down as chairman and CEO), an organization in war with the evil Big Government that wants to steal your children and which strongly encourages corporal punishment for kids. A helpful site for information about the organization is this one. The organization is also behind the sites “True Tolerance” (i.e. intolerance) and “Stand for Christmas”

They are also strongly committed to Biblical values being observed in Washington (Obama, for instance, isn’t really Christian because he distorts the Bible), and argue incessantly for the right of Christians to discriminate against gays and Muslims (the allowing-gays-to-marry-is-discriminating-against-Christians argument). Dobson is also personally committed to restoring Tom DeLay’s reputation (which is especially awesome in light of DeLay's recent conviction).

He has also claimed that teaching tolerance in school leads to Hitler.

Dobson is (unsurprisingly) a creationist and a frequent critic of evolution. He also, with 24 other evangelicals, called for the ouster of Rev. Richard Cizik from his position at the National Association of Evangelicals because Cizik had urged evangelicals to take global warming seriously. Dobson was also a firm opponent of McCain’s presidential candidacy, partially because he “voted for embryonic stem-cell research to kill nascent human beings”.

If you're willing to run the risk of your head exploding, you can watch this dialogue between Dobson and Glenn Beck.

Diagnosis: An astoundingly repulsive character, and a true loon. He has been referred to as "the nation's most influential evangelical leader" by Time, and Slate described him as "America's most influential evangelical leader." A not insignificant threat to civilization, then.

#85: Martin Cothran

Fellow traveler with the Discovery Institute creationists, global warming denier, shill for James Dobson and Pat Buchanan, sycophant who defends Buchanan’s holocaust denial while at the same time accusing Obama of being an anti-semite.

A staunch opposer of gay marriage (claiming that it’s not really a question of marriage, since marriage by definition is between man and woman) and an affiliate of the hardcore fundamentalist group Focus on the Family. Theoconservative.

Nothing particularly notable about these views, of course. What makes Cothran notable (for the purposes of this Encyclopedia) is the fact that Cothran is a logic teacher (at a small private school) and has written an Intro to Logic textbook. One would have to conclude that Cothran the logic teacher is a real, living Chinese Room. He is further discussed here.

Diagnosis: Stock loon and bigoted theocrat. Unimportant and hardly notable were it not for his background.