Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson attempted to revise an earlier statement in which he compared the Ku Klux Klan and the present-day Supreme Court.

During the April 11 broadcast of the Focus on the Family radio show, which featured Mark Levin, author of Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America (Regnery, February 2005), as his guest, Dobson said:

DOBSON: I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South, and they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're talking about.

The operative word in Dobson's statement is “now.” His reference to “black-robed men” was clearly to the justices presently serving on the Supreme Court (except the court's two female members, whom he either forgot or deliberately excluded from his Klan comparison). Moreover, during the program, Dobson limited his discussion with Levin almost exclusively to the present-day judiciary.

But on the May 24 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, Dobson denied attacking the current Supreme Court, claiming instead that he was referring only to the Supreme Court of 1857 that issued the infamous Dred Scott decision, which upheld the institution of slavery. His denial came in response to co-host Alan Colmes, who confronted Dobson about his earlier statement:

COLMES: You said this: “I heard a minister the other day talking about the great injustice and evil of the men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan, that roamed the country in the South. And they did great wrong to civil rights and to morality. And now we have black-robed men, and that's what you're talking about.” Are you comparing men and women -- you didn't mention the women -- in black robes to those who wore white robes in the Klan? Is that an analogy you're making there?

DOBSON: No. No, Alan, I'm on the radio three hours a week. That should have been fleshed out more if I was going to say that. The whole story there is, I heard this minister talk about when he was young, and he grew up in the South. And there was tremendous discrimination there and he saw the Ku Klux Klan and what they did. And he fought against it, at personal sacrifice.

But now that he is older, he sees wrongs being done by the court. And he went back to the 1858 [sic: 1857] decision of Dred Scott, which declared black people not fully human. That was another form of evil. And he was saying evil comes in either black or white, comparing black robes or white robes.

COLMES: But you're comparing those in black robes to those in white robes, and you're comparing the Klan to judges on the court.

DOBSON: I certainly would compare the court that made the decision in Dred Scott to be tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan. They did as much damage.