Dr.
Laura Spreads Her Hate Too Far
by
Adriene Sere
Dr. Laura finally got
in trouble.
For eight years now, the extraordinarily popular talk
radio host Laura Schlessinger has bashed women and fanned
the flames of anti-feminism as the heart and soul of her
program.
For four hours a day, five days a week, Schlessinger
calls women sluts, bimbos, and other gender-based insults
like a refrain. She uses the word “woman” as a
slur against “misbehaving” female callers.
“Woman!” she calls them, making clear by
intonation and context that the word means “moral
idiot.” She tells women who “take
responsibility” that they act like men. She advises
women to think like men.
Schlessinger describes girls as manipulative by nature,
and contrasts them with more noble, straightforward boys.
She rants at length about the nastiness of women as a
group. “Aren’t women horrid? Women are just
horrid,” she said on one show, and substantiated her
claim with two personal experiences: one in which a woman
driver “stole” her parking place, and another
in which a woman talked during a movie, and didn’t
stop after Schlessinger’s husband told the woman to
shush.
Schlessinger rants to her daily audience of 20 million
against abortion rights. She describes abortion as
murder, and calls women who have had an abortion
“murderers.” She trashes mothers of almost
every sort: single mothers; married mothers with full
time jobs or, worse, careers; and stay home married
mothers who have low self-esteem, are bossed by their
husbands, and put too much of their personal identity
into their children.
As it happens, her powerfully influential show has
coincided with a significant increase in those of this
country who identify as “pro-life.” Her show
has also coincided with a sharp rise in this
country’s vicious scapegoating of mothers, a
scapegoating which, in 1996, resulted in the dismantling
of the federal welfare system, making women and children
more vulnerable than ever to violence, poverty, and
oppression.
Schlessinger, who makes millions of dollars for
expressing her opinions, openly mocks battered women. She
insists that battered women “knew” ahead of
time that the men they allowed into their lives would
batter them. On a recent show (3/21), Schlessinger
advised a male caller, “Adam,” not to give
shelter to his sister who was ending a relationship with
a man who was a felon. After listening to Adam’s
question for approximately 15 seconds, she expressed
contempt for the woman leaving the relationship, and
arrogantly insisted the woman instead move three states
away and change her name.
Schlessinger: It was her decision to marry a
really bad man, and to stay with him a really long time,
and to make the situation very worse. So I don’t
think you need to take this on yourself, that you’re
obligated somehow to do this...She didn’t worry
about the family when she got together with this
guy...And I don’t want to be there the day she says,
‘I’m going back. Sorry, he really needs
me.’ I don’t want [laughing] to be there the
day she says that to you.
Adam: [also laughing] And they do, and they will.
Schlessinger: Oh, you know what I’m saying
here.
Adam: Yeah. Well shoot. But I love my sister.
...
Schlessinger: Just because you love her
doesn’t mean you have to allow her potentially hurt
you. We call that stupid. I mean, that’s the excuse
she used to be with him. ‘But I love him.’
Well, gee, that excuses all stupidity then, right? [in a
Munchkin voice] ‘First it was love means never
having to say you’re sorry. Now it means you can be
stupid.’ [laughs] Alright? Take care. I’m Dr.
Laura Schlessinger.
By simply tuning to Laura Schlessinger’s show for
one hour, any day of the week, a listener can hear
examples of woman-bashing. Nevertheless, progressives
hardly muttered a word of protest against Schlessinger.
Until now. Schlessinger currently faces a groundswell of
highly organized progressive opposition because she
started to include gay men in her bashing repertoire.
Much of her gay bashing applies to women as well as men,
but since the welfare and dignity of lesbians are of no
more concern to society than that of the rest of women,
we can assume that progressive alarms are going off out
of concern for gay men. If
Schlessinger had insulted some characteristic of lesbians that
gay men have nothing in common with -- if, for example, she
called lesbian sex a perversion because there is no
penis involved, yet made no disparaging remarks about gay
men -- the progressive community would have continued its
silence, and the gay rights community would have merely
grumbled in reply.
Norman Solomon, syndicated columnist from the media watch
organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, wrote
for the first time about Schlessinger’s show in an
article called “Dr. Laura: Radio’s Leading
Anti-Gay Zealot” (Feb 25)
“Dr. Laura does a lot of harm. Sitting at a powerful
microphone, she spews abuse at those who live outside the
circle she has drawn around humanity. Being gay is
‘a biological error,’ Schlessinger
proclaims.”
Solomon goes on to tell us that on June 9 of last year,
Schlessinger expressed scorn for gay rights. Then, on
August 9, she said that being gay was a biological error,
and three days later, she called it
“dysfunction” and “deviancy.”
This is shocking and harmful, absolutely. But Solomon
made no mention of her thousands of disparaging remarks
about women, or her virulent (and influential)
anti-feminist politics, which are the mainstay of her
program. Are gay men the only ones who count here?
“(S)he’s fond of laying down the moralistic law
in no uncertain terms. For gays, that means a steady
stream of corrosive venom,” Solomon writes.
Schlessinger’s steady stream of corrosive venom has
been directed at females, not at gay men. Gay men have
simply been experiencing the overflow. Solomon’s
erasure of women in his criticism of Schlessinger amounts
to an acceptance of her misogyny as normal and
inconsequential.
Other progressives not only ignored Schlessinger’s
misogyny, but threw in their own. Posted on AlterNet is
an article by Don Hazen called “The Cruel Sisters of
American Media: Judge Judy and Dr. Laura.”
Just in case the title of the article fails to show the
correlation between the gender of these
“sisters” and their malice, Hazen emphasizes
their femaleness again and again in his opening
paragraph:
“America the Cruel has two relatively new female
media stars. The two, Laura Schlessinger -- aka Dr. Laura
-- and Judy Sheidlin -- aka Judge Judy -- have now
uttered enough hateful inanities that popular uprisings
against them, using Web sites as organizing tools, are
underway. The goal of these Internet campaigns is to put
enough pressure on advertisers to dislodge the two women
from their highly visible, very profitable and socially
destructive media perches.”
The talk radio bird -- who was able to became rich and
famous through a male-supremacist media for the simple
reason that she serves male supremacy so well -- apologized
for her remarks about gays soon after the public outcry
became loud and threatening enough. She said,
"Regrettably, some of the words I've used have hurt
some people, and I am sorry for that ... They were not
meant to characterize homosexual individuals or encourage
others to disparage homosexuals.”
The apology, of course, isn’t good enough, and the
progressive opposition isn’t letting up. Celebrities
and liberal politicians are joining the cause. Two major
advertisers have announced they will no longer advertise
on Schlessinger’s show. The Stop Dr. Laura
website -- which is full of arguments claiming that bigotry
against Jews and African Americans is taken much more
seriously than bigotry against gays, while the site
ignores/endorses Schlessinger’s nonstop attacks on
women and feminism -- has had almost 14 million visitors
during its first three weeks of existence. The campaign
will soon announce their “6-month plan” to
counter Schlessinger and stop her from getting her
promised TV program from Paramount.
Consistent with the campaign’s
erasure of women, we also see the old “free speech”
double standard. Activists argue that their effort to stop
Schlessinger from getting a TV show is a
legitimate attempt to interfere with illegitimate speech. But for 15 years,
progressives have, almost without exception, defended pornographers’
right to “free speech” without interference from women who want a world free of the danger and mysogyny that so much of pornography cultivates. Many of
those who are now so willing to stop Dr. Laura because of what is an unproven connection between her bigoted words and deranged
men’s hate crimes against gays, are among the same
folks who have mocked feminists’ claim that there is a
direct connection between pornography and violence
against women. Many of those who want to stop Dr. Laura
went along with the argument that “individuals”
who attack women are the ones who should be held
responsible for violence, not the pornographers and
woman-bashers. Have such arguments now become irrelevant?
Let’s hope that those who are carrying out this
campaign to stop Dr. Laura reach at least some of their
goals. Schlessinger’s hate runneth over and, thank
goodness, progressives finally got upset. Too bad for
everyone that this outrage wasn’t sparked upon
Schlessinger’s first, or thousandth, disparagement
of women. Too bad that progressives keep forgetting that
hate always runneth over, and won’t forever limit
itself only to women.
Globalized
Female Slavery | Swedish Gobbles
Providence
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