The paper reported mostly on the Ted Haggard story, but pulled a few remarkable quotes from the interview, notably one in which Dobson claims that liberals have no values and do not know the difference between right and wrong:

Those again on the liberal end of the spectrum are those who have no value system, or at least they say there is no moral and immoral. There's no right or wrong. . . . But when a religious leader, or especially an evangelical, falls, guess who is the most judgmental of him and calling him a hypocrite? . . . Those that said there is no right and wrong in the first place. The truth of the matter is there is right and wrong. And we all within our midst have failures, and they do occur."

Meanwhile, Dobson says that Christian counseling could cure disgraced evangelist Ted Haggard of his homosexuality in three to five years.

KING: Well, how could a gay person preach against gays? How could you do that?

DOBSON: Well, a lot of people wonder that. He, obviously, was, again, at war with himself. He was involved in activities that I think horrified him. He said that he fought against it, but he also knew what he believed.

It was not hypocrisy. It was a struggle between behavior and the belief system.

KING: How long does counseling last in this kind of case?

DOBSON: It could be a long time. I would think that the restoration process here, if Reverend Haggard chooses to go through with it, would be three to five years.

KING: And is success the fact that he is no longer gay? Would that be your definition of success?

DOBSON: That would be part of it. It's a spiritual restoration, too. It's a personal and marital restoration. It involves every aspect of life.

Here is Dobson explaining his admittedly controversial theory of homosexuality:

KING: We discussed this before in the past, but not recently: Do you still believe that being gay is a choice rather than a given?

DOBSON: I never did believe that.

KING: Oh, you don't believe it.

DOBSON: I don't believe that. Neither do I believe it's genetic. I said that...

KING: Then what is it?

DOBSON: I said that on your program one time and both of us got a lot of mail for it. I don't blame homosexuals for being angry when people say they've made a choice to be gay because they don't.

It usually comes out of very, very early childhood, and this is very controversial, but this is what I believe and many other people believe, that is has to do with an identity crisis that occurs to early to remember it, where a boy is born with an attachment to his mother and she is everything to him for about 18 months, and between 18 months and five years, he needs to detach from her and to reattach to his father.

It's a very important developmental task and if his dad is gone or abusive or disinterested or maybe there's just not a good fit there. What's he going to do? He remains bonded to his mother and...

KING: Is that clinically true or is that theory?

DOBSON: No, it's clinically true, but it's controversial. What homosexual activists, especially, would like everybody to believe is that it is genetic, that they don't have any choice. If it were genetic, Larry -- and before we went on this show, you and I were talking about twin studies -- if it were genetic, identical twins would all have it. Identical twins, if you have a homosexuality in one twin, it would be there in the other.

Dobson later indulged in some well debunked revisionist history. Dobson claims that there is no such thing as separation of church and state, while the historical record clearly shows that while it is true that the phrase separation of church and state is not found in the constitution or the first Amendment, the phrase was in wide use among leading thinkers at the time, and that Jefferson's letter to the Danbury Baptists was an effort by Jefferson to explain his understanding of the meaning of the First Amendment. That is part of the reason why the Supreme Court borrowed the phrase to in explaining what it meant in interpreting the first amendment, and why it has become a standard part of our understanding of the meaning of the constitution.

KING: But we have a separation of church and state.

DOBSON: Beg your pardon?

KING: We have a separation of church and state.

DOBSON: Who says?

KING: You don't believe in separation of church and state?

DOBSON: Not the way you mean it. The separation of church and state is not in the Constitution. No, it's not. That is not in the Constitution. That was...

KING: It's in the Bill of Rights.

DOBSON: It's not in the Bill of Rights. It's not anywhere in a foundational document. The only place where the so-called "wall of separation" was mentioned was in a letter written by Jefferson to a friend. That's the only place. It has been picked up and made to be something it was never intended to be.

What it has become is that the government is protected from the church, instead of the other way around, which is that church was designed to be protected from the government.

KING: I'm going to check my history.

And finally, it is worth noting that the ever-militant Dobson is more than a little politically tone deaf. The Terry Schiavo episode was a  turning point for many Americans' understanding of how extreme and how powerful the religious right had become in the GOP, and in the government.

KING: On reflection though, were you politically wrong on Schiavo?

DOBSON: Absolutely not.

KING: Not politically?

DOBSON: Not politically or morally wrong. I believe that the position that many, many people took -- and there were a lot of them -- who felt that Terri Schiavo was being deprived of life and liberty -- she was handicapped, she was damaged, but since when do we kill people who have a handicap? Where do you start...

KING: Do you believe it was OK for Congress to get involved?

DOBSON: I think they should have done that. They took a moral stance. They took a courageous stance.

As of this writing, there is no significant news or blog coverage of the matters discussed in this post.  As far as I can tell, no liberal religious or political leaders or liberal pundits have weighed in on the latest outrages from Dobson. Much has been made in recent years of how John Kerry did not respond to the Swift Boat Veterans attack on his character and military service record.  But I daresay that the silence in response to Dobson epitomizes what has been going on in America for a generation: a failure to seriously engage the religious right.