Update: Emily E. has located more important information which I had missed. I’ve organized and archived those files in SpongeBob Cache Diving, Redux.

Update: Dr. John Mark Reynolds has posted a truly excellent article on why the lies being spread about Dr. Dobson are harmful to all Christians. That is why they must be opposed. Of course, the best antidote to lies is the truth. Do you know what the truth is?

Dr. James Dobson has posted a lengthy response to the controversy over his statements about the “We Are Family” video. It’s a must read for anyone who cares about the truth.

But while the video is harmless on its own, I believe the agenda behind it is sinister. My brief comments at the FRC gathering were intended to express concern not about SpongeBob or Big Bird or any of their other cartoon friends, but about the way in which those childhood symbols are apparently being hijacked to promote an agenda that involves teaching homosexual propaganda to children. Nevertheless, the media jumped on the story by claiming that I had accused SpongeBob of being “gay.” Some suggested that I had confused the organization that had created the video with a similarly named gay-rights group.  In both cases, the press was dead wrong, and I welcome this opportunity to help them get their facts straight.

I want to be clear: the We Are Family Foundation — the organization that sponsored the video featuring SpongeBob and the other characters was, until this flap occurred, making available a variety of explicitly pro-homosexual materials on its Web site. It has since endeavored to hide that fact (more on this later), but my concerns are as legitimate today as they were when I first expressed them in January.

When the controversy first broke out, David Huntwork of Men’s News Daily immediately weighed in with “Bait and Switch: Feminist/Gay Axis Using SpongeBob to Fight ‘Compulsory Hetrosexuality’” where he documented some of the pro-homosexual agenda which has since been removed from the We Are Family Foundation’s web site. He concludes with:

This entire debacle of Leftist psycho babble indoctrination can be viewed at http://www.wearefamilyfoundation.org. I encourage you to hold your nose, jump into the deep end of the culture wars and give it a visit. The PC police are on the march this spring and, using cartoon characters as their cover, they are coming to an elementary school near you.

Serge at Imago Dei has also covered Dr. Dobson’s statement, noting:

Alan accused the WAFF website taking down a number of links that promoted a pro-homosexuality agenda (not mere tolerance), and it appears that he was correct.

I can already see the response by those who don’t want to believe Dr. Dobson’s claims about the We Are Family Foundation. They’ll claim that there is no evidence and that Dobson is lying. In fact, mumon, a regular skeptic in the comments section of the evangelical outpost, wrote this in the comments at HobbsOnline:

Dobson’s full of it, and it’s not holiness.

I’ve documented Dobson’s lies elsewhere, and the letter you’ve quoted above is another instance of Dobson’s patholical dishonesty: notice that not a single media outlet was quoted!

Moreover, note that specific charges that had been levelled against him go unrefuted!

The bottom line charges laid down by Dr. Dobson is that the We Are Family Foundation is promoting (among other things) a pro-homosexual agenda. Furthermore, there IS proof.

Let’s start with pages which are still available on the WAFF web site. The first is an article about Miss America 2004. (If the article disappears, I have cached a copy of the article here*.) The article is much more about “diversity” and “tolerance” than it is about Ericka Dunlap. As Dr. Dobson points out:

I’m sure you can see, now, why I expressed great concern about the intention of the We Are Family Foundation in using SpongeBob and company to promote the theme of “tolerance and diversity,” which are almost always buzzwords for homosexual advocacy.

The words “sexual identity” in that last sentence hold the key to understanding what is going on here. They reveal a very clever and subtle intent lying below the water line. The stated purpose, as we have seen, is to teach children to respect each other and to accept those who are different. We are entirely supportive of that message. I have been teaching it for years. There appears to be another agenda operating here, however, that has serious implications for your kids. Quite simply, it is to desensitize very young children to homosexual and bisexual behavior.

In another page, titled “101 Ways To Combat Prejudice” (Cached here*) they list recommended actions, including this suggestion:

Meet with school and community librarians and local bookstores to discuss ways to highlight literature that is representative of all cultures and sexual orientations.

Okay, so “diversity” and “tolerance” can be taken many ways. That doesn’t actually prove that WAFF is changing their web site to hide from Dr. Dobson’s charges. Where’s the beef?

One of the truly interesting aspects of the internet is that if you put up a web page, the odds are that it will wind up stored on a hard drive somewhere and it can still be accessed even if that page is later changed or even removed entirely from the original web site. Two prime tools for such “cache diving” are The Wayback Machine and Google. So I decided to make use of these tools and see if they proved Dr. Dobson’s charges.

Here is Dr. Dobson’s discussion of one of those changes:

During my remarks in Washington, I shared my suspicion about children being coerced into signing this “Tolerance Pledge.” My critics quickly sought to marginalize my warning. Nile Rodgers exasperatingly explained to “FOX News’” Bill O’Reilly that, “Even on our Web site, we don’t ask people to sign the pledge.” Oh really? Prior to my speech, the pledge, as it appeared on the foundation’s Web site, concluded with the following paragraph:

“To fulfill my pledge, I __________________ will examine my own biases and work to overcome them, set a positive example for my family and friends, work for tolerance in my own community, speak out against hate and injustice. We share a world. For all our differences, we share one world. To be tolerant is to welcome the differences and delight in the sharing.”

Once the individual filled in his or her name, there was a “submit” button to the right of the pledge that would, ostensibly, officially record that “pledge” commitment. This portion of the pledge has also disappeared from the Web site.

The Wayback Machine shows that Dr. Dobson’s charge is, in fact, true and that Nile Rodgers of WAFF was lying. You can see their cached copy of this page here. (Just in case, you can find my cached copy here.)

One of WAFF‘s programs which has since been removed from their web site is a course titled “Writing For Change.” They state its purpose like this:

Second, and perhaps more importantly, we recognize the unique and paradoxical role of language in our lives. We use this powerful tool to shape our thoughts and experiences, yet patterns and structures in the language itself can shape us in return. In the words of one activist, “Our words create our world.”

If language creates reality, we decided our best hope of shaping the reality we would like to see is to examine the negative and harmful underpinnings of this powerful but often invisible tool, and refocus them to begin creating a language of equality and inclusion.

In other words, to focus is to change how children think by affecting how they use language. Of course, you will no longer see the page which includes this statement on their web site. It has been removed along with the rest of the pages pertaining to Writing For Change because an examination of the materials supports Dr. Dobson’s charge that WAFF is pushing a pro-homosexuality agenda.

So, you might ask, if those pages have been removed, how did I find them? Google also caches web pages for some period of time. By searching their cache, I was able to find a number of pages giving an overview of WFC. (The details are apparently in PDF files which Google does not cache.) Four of those pages expose the fact that WFC is intended to change how children think and that the lie that all ideas — including sexual practices — are equally acceptable. As with the other pages I’ve discussed, I’ve archived copies on my site.

(Note: These pages are copies of the page displayed by Google from their cache. The only change to these pages is renaming the files to treat them as HTML files. Google provided the URL to their cache in the header of the page, so you can compare my copies with Google’s cached version for as long as they last.)

Introduction (Google’s cached copy) This page was captured by Google on January 8, 2005.

Using This Guide (Google’s cached copy) This page was captured by Google on January 9, 2005.

Section 1 (Google’s cached copy) Notice the multiple activities discussing sexual orientation. This page was captured by Google on Januay 23, 2005.

Resources (Google’s cached copy) For a “writing course” WFC sure uses a lot of pro-homosexual books! This page was captured by Google on January 8, 2005.

So who is really lying here? Dr. James Dobson when he says that WAFF is pusing a pro-homosexual agenda? Or is it the We Are Family Foundation when they say they are not? The evidence says that Dr. Dobson is telling the truth and that WAFF is lying through their teeth.

(If you haven’t already, be sure to check out my previous post about the logical fallacies being used to attack Dr. Dobson.)

(* Files marked with an asterisk have had a <base href> tag added so images and links will work. No other modifications have been made to the HTML code.)