Dobson was not comparing actions; he was comparing ideas: namely the idea that because good may result from an immoral action, the action becomes moral.
He is, of course, right. The only question is whether this rule applies to embryonic stem cell research. On this, good people can and do differ. What good people must not do is attribute to James Dobson repugnant views he did not express.
Yet that is what the Anti-Defamation League and others have done.
In an angry letter to Dr. Dobson, the ADL national director, Abraham Foxman, wrote that it is an "offensive misuse of the Holocaust to compare stem cell research to the hideous barbarities of Nazi pseudo-science." Foxman's statement is entirely right, but Dobson never made that comparison. It appears that it is Abraham Foxman who owes James Dobson an apology.
Having said that, it is important to note why Jews are so sensitive (as any moral individual should be) to the cheapening of the evil of the Holocaust. It is done too often, and mostly on the Left with its frequent equation of conservatives to Nazis and PETA's equating of barbecuing chickens with cremating Jews ("Holocaust on your plate"). It is also done on the Right when abortions are labeled "America's Holocaust." As immoral as most abortions are, one cannot compare the Holocaust with America's terrible number of abortions. There is not a Jew alive now or who lived during the Holocaust who would not have prayed to God that six million Jewish unborn had been aborted rather than six million Jewish men, women and children been tortured, gassed and burned.
But Jews must not allow their desire to protect the integrity of the Holocaust, let alone their historical fear of Christianity and the Right, to blind them to the reality that their best friends today are indeed Christians and conservatives. One of whom is James Dobson, who said nothing wrong.