AI Is A Gateway To The Welfare State
October 6, 2026 |
Keith Giles
When the newly released Epstein files showed that Jeffrey Epstein sent a James Dobson article to a girl complaining about her father, it was far from surprising. Because James Dobson’s teachings normalized and reinforced many of the ideas that undergird abuse.
I’m going to reveal those teachings, so buckle up.
Dobson was not some fringe crank. He was evangelicalism’s rock star of parenting and marriage advice for decades. His books sold in the millions. His radio show reached more than a million listeners a day. Churches trusted him. Parents trusted him. Pastors deferred to him. And churches stuffed his pamphlets in their bulletins week after week.
He was treated as an authority not just on children and families, but on morality itself.
Dobson’s work didn’t nurture children or protect families. It was about obedience. Compliance. Control. And those frameworks reliably create harm.
Dobson did not merely tolerate spanking and other forms of corporal punishment; he instructed exactly how and when to use them to break in your children like a horse.
In Focus on the Family parenting materials, corporal punishment is described as something some children “demand” and therefore should receive. One Dobson-affiliated booklet states plainly that strong-willed children “absolutely demand to be spanked, and their wishes should be granted.”
That is not a reluctant allowance. That is endorsement.
Dobson also promoted physical techniques designed to overpower children. In The Strong-Willed Child, he recounts recommending pinching a nerve on a child’s shoulder until the child collapses to their knees. The point was not safety. The point was dominance. It was about demonstrating who had power.
Modern psychology could not be clearer about this. Corporal punishment is associated with increased aggression, anxiety, depression, and damaged parent-child relationships. The American Academy of Pediatrics explicitly advises parents not to spank. A major meta-analysis by Gershoff and Grogan-Kaylor found no long-term benefits and consistent harm.
Pain does not teach wisdom. It teaches fear.
Dobson was explicit about his philosophy. He believed the task of parenting was to shape or break a child’s will, and that this work had to begin early. He warned parents that if they did not assert control by early childhood, sometimes as young as four, the opportunity would be lost.
This is not guidance. It is domination and damaging.
Psychology has a name for this: psychological control. It refers to parenting that targets a child’s inner life, emotions, resistance, and autonomy rather than behavior alone. Decades of research link psychological control to worse mental health outcomes, increased anxiety, and impaired self-regulation.
Self-regulation is an essential human skill that must be learned in childhood. People who can’t self-regulate destroy relationships and hurt people both physically and mentally.
Who attacks Big Bird and Barney, really!?
Dobson publicly warned that children’s programming like Sesame Street and Barney was spiritually dangerous. He called them “pro-homosexual” And framed diversity as LGBTQ coded languages.
Messages about kindness, inclusion, and empathy were reframed as ideological threats.
This is classic moral panic. It teaches parents to distrust joy, creativity, and curiosity, and to replace them with vigilance and suspicion. Research on moral panics shows the outcome is not safer children. It is more anxious ones.
Fear is easier to sell than discernment. Dobson sold fear extremely well.
Dobson’s organizations promoted the idea that LGBTQ identity was sinful, evil, and something that should be resisted and rejected. They were treatable abnormalities. Focus on the Family published counseling resources, parent guides, and conferences that aligned with conversion therapy frameworks, even when the language softened.
Every major medical and psychological organization rejects this approach. The American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry state clearly that sexual orientation change efforts lack evidence and are associated with harm.
That harm includes increased depression, shame, and suicidal ideation. LGBTQ youth subjected to rejection or “change” efforts have significantly higher rates of suicide attempts.
This makes kids attempt suicide. It feels like we should at least set a bar that if a theological belief has this outcome, it should be rejected. I know it’s a low bar, but it feels like one we can clear.
Dobson framed the heterosexual two-parent family as God’s design, not just an ideal, and insisted that mothers and fathers provide distinct, non-interchangeable roles. By definition, same sex parents were cast as incapable of giving children what he called God’s best.
He justified this position by presenting it as child protection rather than exclusion. Same sex parenting was framed as a risky social experiment imposed on children to satisfy adult desires, while research supporting LGBTQ parents was dismissed as biased or ideological. Adoption agencies that placed children with same sex couples were condemned for abandoning biblical truth, and agencies that refused those placements were praised as faithful.
The research says otherwise.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and decades of peer-reviewed studies show that child outcomes depend on stability, caregiving quality, and resources, not parents’ gender.
Dobson’s claims were not grounded in data. They were grounded in ideology. And they were used to justify denying families legal protections and children permanent, loving homes.
Focus on the Family materials consistently frame transgender identity as confusion rather than self-knowledge. Trans kids are not described as discovering who they are but as being misled by culture, ideology, or personal distress. Parents are encouraged to approach a child’s gender identity as a problem to be corrected, not a reality to be understood, and affirming care is treated as dangerous.
Schools play a predictable villain role in this narrative. Inclusive policies and affirming language are framed as threats, with schools depicted as places where children are pressured, indoctrinated, or recruited into identities they would not otherwise choose. A child asserting a transgender identity is treated less as a person expressing themselves and more as a site of rebellion against God’s design and parental authority.
Medical consensus again disagrees. Affirming care improves mental health outcomes. Period. Rejection increases risk of depression and suicide.
When religious institutions train parents to treat their child’s identity as a problem to be corrected, the damage is not accidental. It is structural.
Dobson did not stop at the family. He helped build the modern evangelical political machine. He is credited with being central in the rise of the religious right.
He mobilized evangelical voters, launched advocacy arms like the Family Research Council, and framed conservative policy goals as biblical imperatives. Political losses were cast as spiritual crises. Opponents became threats to children and God’s design.
Sociologists describe this fusion as Christian nationalism. When faith, national identity, and divine authority merge, people become more tolerant of coercion and more willing to excuse harm by leaders who promise protection.
And then there’s Trump.
For decades, Dobson insisted character mattered. Sexual morality mattered. Truth mattered. Those standards evaporated when political power was on the line. When faced with a choice, Dobson and his cronies caved. He supported Trump’s candidacy even though Trump’s life and actions directly contradicted everything the religious right had been insisting was essential in a political leader.
Wow. Power is all that mattered.
Returning to the news, what is important to see is that this is all intertwined.
Jeffrey Epstein did not invent abuse culture. He exploited systems that already trained people to distrust victims, excuse authority, and prioritize reputation over truth.
Dobson’s teachings did not create Epstein. But they helped shape a moral environment where control looks like care, silence looks like faithfulness, and harm can be justified using the Bible if the right people benefit.
That is the legacy the supporters and promoters of Dobson and Focus on the Family need to face.
Because when religion teaches people to surrender their instincts, break and distrust their children, promote all kinds of widely-known harmful practices, and protect power at all costs, abuse does not appear as an aberration.
It has been given permission.
