Reprinted with permission of Charisma News Services.

Pro-family champion Dr. James Dobson last night blamed poor media role models for contributing to the breakdown of society. While television and movies portray gays in a positive light, husbands and fathers are typically discredited, he said on CNN.

Speaking on "Larry King Live," the founder and president of Focus on the Family said he was troubled that there is a generation of boys "watching sitcoms on television and in movies and programs like that" who "never see a father who is dedicated to his wife and children and not a post-adolescent crazy like most of them are."

Meanwhile, he added, most sitcoms "have a very respectful gay character, and it's propaganda. And that bothers me because kids grow up with no role models of what it means to be a man."

Dobson told interviewer Larry King that the disintegration of the family is affecting boys more than girls. Boys are "in a great deal of trouble today," doing poorly when compared with girls in almost every index. "They are six times more likely to have learning problems, three times more likely to be on drugs," he said.

In a rare media appearance outside his own Focus broadcasting, Dobson discussed child abuse, condom use, Islam, prayer and partial-birth abortion in an hourlong exchange with King that returned to homosexuality.

Dobson said he is opposed to allowing homosexual couples to adopt children. "There are hundreds, if not thousands, of articles and studies in the journals that show that children do best when you have a mother and a father providing role modeling for those kids and who are committed to each other."

He agreed with King that there are gay couples who raise children well, but said, "You don't base your policies on the exceptions." Children raised by same-sex parents have only one role model, which means "they also tend to be confused in their gender."

Disagreeing with homosexuals is not about a lack of respect or denying them the same rights, Dobson said. But there is "a major problem" when gays want to change the definition of marriage.

"The family was designed for a purpose. And if you go tampering with it, the whole thing crumbles. See, if two men can be married or two women, where do you stop that? Two men and three women? Four men and one woman?"

He added: "If the family means everything, the family means nothing...Some people would like the family just to be a circle of love. Well, what happens when somebody falls out of the circle of love? Well, then they're not in the family anymore. And it just creates chaos."

Dobson said that it is a "big mistake" for people to say that homosexuality was chosen. "It usually isn't. [But] it is possible to change." Nor did he believe that homosexuality is genetic. If that were true, identical twins, for example, would both turn out to be gay, but this is not the case.

Additionally, if homosexuality were genetic "it would gradually disappear from the gene pool because they don't reproduce as often. And so, over 5,000 years, it would go away. But it is not chosen, and it is not genetic. It has another origin."