Writer Angela Phillips believes, and I agree, that the high incidence of homosexuality occurring in Western nations is related, at least in part, to the absence of positive male influence when boys are moving through the first crisis of child development.
Or so Dr. Dobson claims in an article titled How Boys Learn to be Men.
The problem is that Angela Phillips does NOT believe that at all. Per her letter on Wayne Besen’s site,
I do not suggest that lack of positive male role models leads to homosexuality (or indeed that it would be problematic if it did).
and
My concern is that boys are currently learning, either from their fathers, or in the absence of fathers, from the women who rear them, and the men they encounter, that the most important thing about being a man is being: “not gay”, “not gentle” and not “girlie”. While adult men are afraid to demonstrate that it’s okay to be gentle and caring how are boys to learn anything positive about what it means to be a man?
In that article Dr. Dobson quotes Don Elium, Peter Karl, Dr. Carol Gilligan, Angela Phillips, Dr. Kyle Pruett, Dr. William Pollock, and the National Center for Children in Poverty as being in agreement with his ideas. Of those seven, Dr. Carol Gilligan, Dr. Kyle Pruett, and now Angela Phillips have accused him of grossly and irresponsibly misrepresenting their research.
Once is “ooops”, three times is blatant dishonesty.
I thought the point behind NARTH was to have a professional sounding organization that would create quotable pseudo science for Dobson and others to use in just this kind of article. If he would stick to quoting Berger, et al, Dobson wouldn’t have to worry about being rebuked by the authors – they wouldn’t dare 😉
I tried to do some quicky research on Don Elium to see if he would be inclined to support Dr. Dobson. I can’t be certain.
The discription for one of his book does include “-a resource section for parents of gay sons and other sexual identity issues” but that could go either way.