Two researchers cited by James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, in a piece about Mary Cheney’s pregnancy in this month’s Time Magazine are speaking out against the way Dobson used their work to support discrimination.

The conservative religious leader argued that Cheney and her lesbian partner will fall short as parents because children need a father.

“I was mortified to learn that you had distorted my work,” New York University professor Carol Gilligan wrote Dobson. She said he had taken her research out of context “to support discriminatory goals that I do not agree with.”

Kyle Pruett of Yale Medical School wrote that he was “startled and disappointed” that Dobson had “cherry-picked a phrase to shore up highly (in my view) discriminatory purposes.”

You can find Maria on MySpace here and read her current call for essays on femme identity here. Pick up Queer Shorts, her new anthology, at MergePress.com.