Dobson’s Focus on the Family still humiliated by ‘Pray for Rain’ video

Following up on an amusing story we’ve been following, about a week ago, Stuart Shepard, who makes religious-right videos for James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, devoted a segment to asking politically-conservative Christians to pray for rain on Aug. 28, in order to disrupt Barack Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Shepard called for “abundant rain, torrential rain … flood-advisory rain.” He adds, “I’m talking about umbrella-ain’t-gonna-help-you rain … swamp-the-intersections rain.” Explaining why he wants everyone to pray for rain, Shepard explains, without a hint of humor, “I’m still pro-life, and I’m still in favor or marriage being between one man and one woman. And I would like the next president who will select justices for the next Supreme Court to agree.”

Soon after, some Colorado reporters picked up on this, and earlier this week, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann featured Shepard as the “worst person in the world.” Focus, feeling a little humiliated, eventually backpedaled, said the video was intended to be “humorous,” and pulled the clip from its own site and video-sharing sites, including YouTube.

In a follow-up video, Shepard kinda sorta apologized.

People can reach their own conclusions about Shepard’s sincerity.

In the meantime, Focus really doesn’t want anyone to see the video it originally distributed widely.



My friends at Right Wing Watch report:

Despite their efforts to remove the video, someone else uploaded a copy of it to YouTube which quickly generated more than 100,000 views. But now, Focus has gone after that version as well and gotten YouTube to remove it. But try as they might, there are still several versions of the clip available on YouTube and now, News Blab 2008, which first posted the copy of the FOF video to YouTube, has gone ahead and posted it again on their own website, saying Focus “obviously [does] not understand Copyright ‘Fair Use’ when reporting a news story.” On top of that, Good As You also has a copy of it posted on their website.

With that in mind, here, again, is the video Focus seems anxious to hide: