YOUR AD HERE »

Cartoon coward vs. fearless farmer

Matt Zalaznick

James Dobson, meet Miecyslaw Kasprzyk. He claims not to be a Christian, but you could learn boatloads from this fearless, dissident Polish farmer. Dobson, the fiery founder of the fanatical right wing Focus on the Family, met Kasprzyk in a recent issue of the Sunday New York Times. Well, they didn’t exactly shake hands, but articles about them were placed revealingly on facing pages. Dobson, who sees the hand of his god in returning the Bush administration to America’s loftiest pulpit, is waging his idiotic intifada against alternative lifestyles. Lately, he’s been pounding – not on leftwing icons like John Stewart and Michael Moore – but on the Day-Glo derriere of the country’s most popular cartoon character, SpongeBob Squarepants. SpongeBob appears in a video encouraging school kids to tolerate any and all cultures, but Dobson found the devil in it. He’s also been bashing one of SpongeBob’s cartoon comrade, Buster the Bunny, for that road-tripping rabbit’s dangerous liaisons with some Vermont lesbians. Persecuting the politics of imaginary animals may be preposterous, but here’s the incredible statement the Times said Dobson put on his Web site:”The problem is not with acceptance or kindness, certainly. But kids should not be taught that homosexuality is another ‘lifestyle.'”Only a very demented few will admit to being capital-B bigots. And one wonders if anybody reads Dobson’s hilarious-if-they-weren’t-so-hateful postings back to him. Yes, he says, kindness is quite OK. But if you’re going to be a Dobson kid, you oughta know acceptance is outlawed and tolerance is taboo when it comes to having two mommies or two daddies. On the following page of that Sunday’s New York Times was a story tying into the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp, a symbol of hate and intolerance that may never be out-eviled by even the most eager evildoers. The article told the tale of Kasprzyk’s teenage bravery in hiding at his farm a young Jewish girl and her brother, whose mother had been killed. He had once been ordered to use his horse cart to bring a group of Jews to cemetery, where they were robbed and shot. The article does not imply whether it was this horror – or just the urge to do the right thing – that inspired him to help two young Jews. But he did and when his farmhouse became too dangerous for his stowaways, he got them jobs at other farms. Both children lived through the Holocaust. So, on one page, an example of the same ethnic and cultural arrogance (or craven cowardice) that breeds tyrannical movements like the Nazis or the KKK, and on the next, a staggering example of one man’s refusal to judge, discriminate or see differences in his fellow man in the face of an immense, intimidating evil that was urging him to hate, hate, hate and kill, kill, kill. Dobson is headquartered in Colorado Springs, which is also home also to Cheyenne Mountain, the hyper-fortified American military defense installation built to resist the apocalypse.No better place, then, than deep within the impenetrable, heavily guarded, thermonuclear-resistant walls of this fortress to bury and blot out forever nauseating worldviews such as Dobson’s. City Editor Matt Zalaznick can be reached at mzalaznick@vaildaily.com or 949-0555, ext. 606.Vail, Colorado


Support Local Journalism