Steve Benen reports feeling schadenfreude at the news that James Dobson’s Focus of the Family has announced that it is cutting 202 jobs, the deepest cuts in the organizations 32-year history, fresh off of having spent $539,000 to help pass an anti-gay marriage referendum in Colorado. He cites Jim Newell‘s snark:
Sure, you have no income now because James Dobson burnt all of your company’s money on a state ballot proposition. But imagine the alternative! Would you want to be employed knowing that several hundred miles away, in another state, pairs of consenting adults that already have been living together, people whom you’ve never met and will never meet, were applying for state licenses (pieces of paper, really) that offered them some new tax and medical options??
Or, put another way, “Would you want to be employed at an activist institution that didn’t do its job?”
Look, I’m no fan of Dobson and see no reason why gays shouldn’t be able to marry one another. But, surely, organizations that exist solely to do political activism in support of ideological causes ought to deploy their resources on the most high profile issues related to said cause. Otherwise, what’s the point?
Beyond that, unless the 202 people in question were working for an average annual salary of $2661.31, not having fought Proposition 8 wouldn’t have saved their jobs. Indeed, I’d guess that fundraising around Prop. 8 yielded a net plus in revenue for Dobson’s group.
