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Gil Alexander-Moegerle was the first person to join James Dobson's local radio talk show and begin building the empire that is Focus On the Family. Gil opened the Post Office box, the bank account, hired the first assistant and manned the second microphone on every radio broadcast as they built USA's most profitable religious broadcasting empire. But when he pushed for women managers and racially inclusive policies, he was forced out.
In his book, "James Dobson's War on America," Gil shares his personal pain and observations about his partner at Focus on the Family. The books was written at an early point in his attempt to understand what had happened to him and to the "ministry" Gil thought they were building.
I met Gil shortly after the book was released when he visited Colorado Springs and spoke with hundreds of people about the misguided giant that had moved its headquarters to the city a few years before.
Gil talked about the early days when their topics were bed-wetting and temper tantrums. He recalled the slow shift to criticism of government programs and then to directly handling the levers of power to FORCE a perverted Baptist philosophy on the unsuspected people of the nation. "He used to talk about the people in Washington. And how he could get thousands of phone calls to rain down on them like arrows, and they wouldn't even know who was launching them," was how Gil described Dobson's growing lust for power.
Another time, he forced a prominent publisher of Bibles to recall thousands of expensive volumes because it was spoiled by the inclusive "children of god" instead of Dobson's preferred "sons of god."
Other religious writers and scholars were driven out of business, banned from being published, because their take on "the truth" differed from Dobson's.
Gil told of a day when Dobson complained that his Southern California neigborhood drycleaners was filled with too many people who were "not american enough." That observation, along with California's efforts to tax religious non-profits, lead Dobson to seek a new home for his empire.
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