#607: Dave Daubenmire

A.k.a. Coach Daubenmire

A.k.a. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Demagogue

Coach Daubenmire is a former high school football coach who ran into some career trouble in the late 1990s for coercing his students to pray. He was sued by ACLU, though according to himself “the ACLU relented and offered Coach an out of court settlement. God honored his stand and the ACLU backed off,” which sort of fails to mention the fact that the court ordered Daubenmire to stop leading religious activities at school and that the school board paid an $ 18,000 settlement. But Daubenmire is a traditional Liar-for-Jesus, so you wouldn’t expect much honesty from that source. “As a result of the experience, Coach heard the call to move out of coaching a high school team, to the job of coaching God’s team,” is not entirely accurate either.

Well, Daubenmire has built his entire post-coaching career on telling people how his first amendment rights were violated by the Constitution, and on running the ministry he founded, Pass the Salt Ministries (no kidding). Pass the Salt is perhaps most famous for hosting the right wing conference “A gathering of Eagles”, promoted as a “NON-POLITICAL event […] designed to educate Christians about the great moral issues facing this country [,…] such as The Gay Agenda, Abortion, Individual Liberty, Hate Crime Legislation, and the religion of Secular Humanism,” which does not sound distinctly non-political but there you go. Guests included several famous non-partisan Christians such as Flip Benham, Rick Scarborough, and Peter Labarbera.

Daubenmire also runs something called “Minutemen united”, a group of people who disrupts church services to proclaim their anti-gay stance. Those activities have landed him several high-profile television appearances, where he has attempted to (chime in on the Freshwater case and) portray himself as your humble, friendly servant of God – he doesn’t hate his opponents, you see, it is just that they are “enemies of God”. He also advocates revolution to obliterate the distinction between church and state, and is apparently a big fan of David Barton’s dominionist mangling of history.

Now, Daubenmire asserts that he is “not homo-phobic. I'm not homo-hateful. I'm not homo-latent. I'm homo-nauseous. I really couldn’t care less where a man desires to put his appendage. But I’m sick of hearing about it. I’m sick of talking about it. I’m sick of it being force fed to me on TV,” which would at least made slightly more sense if Daubenmire hadn’t so tirelessly talked about it and weren’t so all-consumingly obsessed with it. One wonders how he squares being tired of the debate with his repeated calls on Obama to come clean and admit that he is gay (as well as admit that he is a socialist who is trying to destroy the economy and that he is not really a Christian; Obama is apparently also a sociopath). Then he complains that people say that he says stupid shit.

He didn’t quite get through the Jason Collins affair with his dignity intact either. Daubenmire was predictably outraged that Obama supported him. He also boldly declared that he hates homosexuality, which apparently must be consistent with being “not homo-hateful”, primarily one supposes in virtue of the lying-for-Jesus discourse mandate he seems to possess. He furthermore claimed that homosexuality only exists “because men like you and men like me are letting it go on and won’t stand up and push back and say anything about it.” Because there is surely a shortage of rabid bigots fuming about homosexuality at the moment.