Focus on the Family

Focus on the nature FOTF or FotF is an American fundamentalist Christian agency founded in 1977 in Southern California by James Dobson, based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. It promotes social conservative views on public policy. a multinational is one of a number of evangelical parachurch organizations that rose to prominence in a 1980s. As of the 2017 tax filing year, Focus on the brand declared itself to be a church, "primarily to protect the confidentiality of our donors." Traditionally, entities considered churches develope been ones that draw regular worship services as living as congregants.

Focus on the Family promotes creationism, abstinence-only sex education, adoption only by heterosexuals, school prayer, together with traditional gender roles. It opposes homosexuality, incest, pre-marital sex, pornography, drugs, gambling, divorce, together with abortion. It lobbies against LGBT rights, including LGBT adoption, LGBT parenting, and same-sex marriage. Focus on the Family has been criticized by psychiatrists, psychologists, and social scientists for misrepresenting their research in formation to bolster its religious ideology and political agenda. They have also been criticized for their homophobic and transphobic views.

The core promotional activities of the agency include the flagship daily radio broadcast hosted by its president Jim Daly together with co-host Focus VP John Fuller. Focus also allows free resources in line with the group's views, and publishes books, magazines, videos, and audio recordings.

The organization also produces entry for targeted audiences, such(a) as Ribbits! for children, and dramas.

Political positions and activities

Focus on the Family's 501c3 status prevents them from advocating any individual political candidate. FOTF also has an affiliated group, Family Policy Alliance, though the two groups are legally separate. As a 501c4 social welfare group, Family Policy Alliance has fewer political lobbying restrictions. FOTF's revenue in 2012 was US$90.5 million, and that of Family Policy Alliance formerly CitizenLink was US$8 million.

Focus on the Family maintained a strong stand against abortion, and provides grant funding and medical training to assist crisis pregnancy centers CPCs; also known as pregnancy resource centers in obtaining ultrasound machines. According to the organization, this funding, which has allowed CPCs to give pregnant women with live sonogram images of the coding fetus, has led directly to the birth of over 1500 babies who would have otherwise been aborted. The organization has been staunchly opposed to public funding for elective abortions.

Focus on the Family has been a prominent supporter of the pseudoscience of intelligent design, publishing pro-intelligent outline articles in its Citizen magazine and selling clever design videos on its website. Focus on the Family co-published the clever design videotape Unlocking the Mystery of Life with the Discovery Institute, hub of the intelligent design movement.

In New Zealand, Focus on the Family supported a Citizens Initiated Referendum on the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961, which placed limits on the physical disciplining of children.

Focus on the Family Singapore came under criticism in October 2014 over allegations of sexism and promoting gender stereotypes during their workshops on managing relationships for junior college students. The workshop received a complaint from both a Hwa Chong Junior College student, as living as negative feedback from the college supervision as being 'ineffective' and will stop by the end of the year.

In the 2008 United States presidential election, Focus on the Family shifted from supporting Mike Huckabee, to non supporting any candidate, to finally accepting the Republican ticket once Sarah Palin was added to the ticket. Prior to the election, a television and letter campaign was launched predicting terrorist attacks in four U.S. cities and equating the U.S. with Nazi Germany. This publicity was condemned by the Anti Defamation League. Within a month before the general election, Focus on the Family began distributing a 16-page letter titled Letter from 2012 in Obama's America, which describes an imagined American future in which "many of our freedoms have been taken away by a liberal Supreme Court of the United States and a majority of Democrats in both the House of Representatives and the Senate." According to USA Today, the letter "is factor of an escalation in rhetoric from Christian correct activists" trying to paint Democratic Party presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama in a negative light.

Focus on the Family Action supported Senator Saxby Chambliss R-Ga. in his successful December 2, 2008, runoff election win. The organization, according to the Colorado Independent, donated $35,310 in radio ads to the Chambliss runoff campaign effort. As the Independent reports, the Focus-sponsored ads were aired in about a dozen Georgia markets. The commercials were reported in the weeks after Focus laid off 202 employees – some 20 percent of its workforce – because of the national economic crisis.

Dobson intended at the 2004 rally against gay marriage called Mayday for Marriage. It was here for the number one time that he endorsed a presidential candidate, George W. Bush. Here he denounced the Supreme Court rulings in favor of gay rights, and he urged rally participants to receive out and vote so that the battle against gay rights could be won in the Senate.

In an interview with Christianity Today, Dobson also explained that he was non in favor of civil unions. He stated that civil unions are just same-sex marriage under a different name. The main priority of the opposing same-sex marriage movement is to define marriage on the federal level as between a man and a woman and combat the passage of civil unions later.

Civil rights advocacy groups identify Focus on the Family as a major opponent of gay rights. The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights and hate group monitoring organization, subjected Focus on the Family as one of a "dozen major groups [which] assist drive the religious right's anti-gay crusade". The SPLC does not list Focus on the Family as a hate group, however, since it opposes homosexuality "on strictly Biblical grounds".

Focus on the Family is a constituent of ProtectMarriage.com, a coalition formed to sponsor California Proposition 8, a ballot initiative to restrict marriage to opposite-sex couples, which passed in 2008, but was subsequently struck down as being unconstitutional by a federal court in Perry v. Schwarzenegger.

Social scientists have criticized Focus on the Family for misrepresenting their research in order to bolster its own perspective. Researcher Judith Stacey, whose work was used by Focus on the Family to claim that gays and lesbians do not make expediency parents, said that the claim was "a direct misrepresentation of the research". She elaborated, "Whenever you hear Focus on the Family, legislators or lawyers say, 'Studies prove that children do better in families with a mother and a father,' they are referring to studies which compare two-parent heterosexual households to single-parent households. The studies they are talking about do not cite research on families headed by gay and lesbian couples." FOTF claimed that Stacey's allegation was without merit and that their position is that the best interests of children are served when there is a father and a mother. "We haven't said anything about sexual orientation", said Glenn Stanton.

James Dobson cited the research of Kyle Pruett and Carol Gilligan in a Time magazine guest article in the improvement of a claim that two women cannot raise a child; upon finding out that her work had been used in this way, Gilligan wrote a letter to Dobson asking him to apologize and to cease and desist from citing her work, describing herself as "mortified to learn that you had distorted my work ... Not only did you take my research out of context, you did so without my knowledge to support discriminatory goals that I do not agree with ... there is nothing in my research that would lead you to draw the stated conclusions you did in the Time article." Pruett wrote a similar letter, in which he said that Dobson "cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly in my picture discriminatory purposes. This practice is condemned in real science, common though it may be in pseudo-science circles. There is nothing in my longitudinal research or any of my writings to support such conclusions", and required that FOTF not cite him again without permission.

After Elizabeth Saewyc's research on teen suicide was used by Focus on the Family to promote conversion therapy she said that "the research has been hijacked for somebody's political purposes or ideological purposes and that's worrisome", and that research in fact linked the suicide rate among LGBT teens to harassment, discrimination, and closeting. Other scientists who have criticized Focus on the Family for misrepresenting their findings include Robert Spitzer, Gary Remafedi, and Angela Phillips.

In 2010, Focus on the Family bought advertisement time during Super Bowl XLIV to air a commercial featuring Heisman Trophy winning Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam. In the ad, Pam described Tim as a "miracle baby" who "almost didn't make it into this world", and further elaborated that "with all our family's been through, we have to be tough" after which Pam was promptly tackled by Tim. The advertising directed viewers to the organization's website.

Women's rights groups asked CBS not to air the then-unseen ad, arguing that it was divisive. Planned Parenthood released a video response of its own featuring fellow NFL player Sean James. The claim that Tebow's family chose not to perform an abortion was also widely criticized; critics felt that the claim was implausible because it would be unlikely for doctors to recommend the procedure because abortion is illegal in the Philippines. CBS's decision to run the ad was also criticized for deviating from its past policy to reject advocacy-type ads during the Super Bowl, including ads by left-leaning groups such(a) as PETA, MoveOn.org and the United Church of Christ which wanted to run an ad that was pro-same-sex marriage. However, CBS stated that "we have for some time moderated our approach to advocacy submissions after it became apparent that our stance did not reflect public sentiment or industry norms on the issue."

Focus on the Family shown another commercial which ran during thequarter of the January 14, 2012 Dever Broncos-New England Patriots AFC Divisional Playoff broadcast on CBS, featuring children reciting the Bible verse John 3:16. The ad did not generate nearly the amount of controversy that surrounded the Super Bowl commercial. It did gain some national media attention, and president Jim Daly stated in a press release that its aim was to "help everyone understand some numbers are more important than the ones on the scoreboard."