Know Your Right-Wing Speakers: Laura Schlessinger

Wednesday November 2, 2005

Dr. Laura Schlessinger, by her account, “teaches, preaches, and nags about morals, values, and ethics” and has been doing so for thirty years. She condemns everything from homosexuality to working mothers to public education. In one of her more vitriolic columns, she wrote that her purpose is “to deal in truths and values about life, love, death, responsibilities, character, religion and general, everyday behavior.” Like a number of right-wing mouthpieces, Dr. Laura’s popularity seems more the result of her willingness to say things no one else will than any kind of real expertise in the subjects on which she moralizes.

Schlessinger was raised in a family that she described as dysfunctional, unhappy, and “difficult.” Born in Brooklyn, NY, she received her B.S. in Biological Sciences from the State University of New York at Stony Brook and, eventually, her Ph.D. in Physiology from Columbia University. Married at the age of 25, Dr. Laura has an unusually sordid marital history for someone who berates her callers and listeners for what she sees as unacceptable moral failings in their own personal lives. After a rocky marriage, and several extramarital affairs, Dr. Laura relocated to Los Angeles, where she became a licensed marriage, family, and child counselor at the University of Southern California. While still married to her first husband, Dr. Laura apparently began a nine-year affair with Lewis G. Bishop, a professor of neuro-physiology and married father of three, before finally marrying in 1985.

A morality maven to the masses, who preaches about subjects from premarital sex and fidelity to the importance of being a stay-at-home mom and the immorality of homosexuality, Dr. Laura had an unlikely entrée into radio journalism. Schlessinger tuned into Bill Ballance’s radio show in 1975, shortly after moving to Los Angeles. She placed a call to the show and talked to Ballance for twenty minutes on the air, before he invited her to meet him, telling her he was certain she was destined for radio greatness. It didn’t take long for Ballance, an early shock jock who was known for exploiting and harassing women’s rights activists on his original show, the “Feminine Forum,” to strike up an intimate relationship with Schlessinger, who was purportedly still married. Within a few short years, “The Dr. Laura Show” was born on KFI in Los Angeles.

In 1994, her radio show became syndicated, and her career was jump-started. At its peak, her show was syndicated on 430 stations. In fact, at its peak, her show was the second highest rated after Rush Limbaugh’s. She rose to the top criticizing practices that she felt had become too prevalent in contemporary American culture, including sex outside of marriage, living together before marriage, single parenthood, day care, mothers working outside the home, marrying quickly or at a young age, permissive parenting, abortion, euthanasia, easy or no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage. She has also written several self-help books, including Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives, several religious books, and her most successful tome, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands.

Today Dr. Laura continues to spend her time crusading for what she sees as a more morally sound America. Recent targets of her venom have included that ultimate purveyor of immorality, the American Library Association, which she claims is “boldly, brashly contributing to sexualizing our children,” by relying on the advice column, Ask Alice. She also attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which she asserts “knows as well as I do that condoms do not prevent the spread of many sexually transmitted diseases.” Dr. Laura’s vocal opposition to comprehensive sex education rivals only her firmly anti-choice stance on abortion. Feminism, she argues, is endangering the sacred rite of motherhood, “brainwashing women that money replaces husbands, fathers and marriage.” She frequently reminds her female callers that their first duty is to their husband, their home, and their children, as she once told a caller who “was resentful that her husband did not come home and do housework. I asked her when she did his paperwork, made his phone-calls, drove in his rush hour traffic and dealt with his boss.”

In Dr. Laura’s mind, feminism is not only responsible for the deterioration of the family, but also for the disintegration of intimacy between men and women, and has caused “everything heterosexual, feminine, masculine, motherly, womanly and longed for in a committed relationship [to come] under vicious attack” and that this is the fault of “the National Organization of (I don’t know what kind of) Women-types.” As if that weren’t enough, Dr. Laura argues that feminism is in effect turning women into murderers, claiming, “The feminist’s ‘pro-choice’ message is that women should tear their babies from their bodies to die – so that they are serving the sisterhood by being more available for workplace accomplishments or sexual promiscuity without being hampered by diaper hampers.”

On October 19, 1998, Dr. Laura’s own promiscuity, in the form of her affair with Bill Ballance, came back to haunt her when a dozen nude photos appeared on Internet Entertainment Group’s website, ClubLove. The photos, which Ballance sold to IEG, were equipped with "Live Picture Technology," to enable users to zoom in on specific body parts. Dr. Laura filed a lawsuit against Ballance, which she eventually dropped when she was unable to get an injunction to keep the pictures off the Internet. Of course, Dr. Laura can’t be blamed for foolish mistakes she made in her twenties (or apparently inane hypocritical comments she’s made in her fifties); she’s a victim of her own gender, as she reminded her readers in a column titled “How Low Can Women Go?” “The ultimate baseness and immorality of a culture depends on what women will themselves do and tolerate from their men. Since the 1960s, the so-called liberation of women has proven itself to be a liberation from just about everything that could possibly be of value for a women and for the society she influences by her choice in a man and her commitment to raising the next generation of citizens.” Dr. Laura will stop at nothing to put an end to this exploitation, not even harsh and often sexist name-calling, for example, telling women who “are having sex or shacking up that they are foolishly behaving like unpaid whores. I say that men used to, at least, have to pay hard cash for a little action without deeper meaning, and now they are just serving it up for nothing.” It makes one wonder if Dr. Laura isn’t maybe projecting just a little.

To clarify, though, feminism “isn’t all about hating men – it’s largely about disdaining and dismissing them.” Despite fighting for abstinence-only education, when discussing a married caller proposing abstinence in marriage, Laura disdainfully dismissed her, saying “you’re right, men are difficult.”

Schlessinger is an outspoken critic of homosexuality, claiming, “Of course a society should discriminate. Of course it should. It should discriminate against certain behaviors. And man-on-man and woman-on-woman sexual activity is a deviant sexual orientation.” She’s extended her opposition of comprehensive sex ed to voice her disdain for homosexuality, basically arguing that AIDS is a “gay” problem and that organizations like the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) use AIDS education “as an opportunity to deliver propaganda, primarily about gender, homosexuality, bisexuality and masturbation. How ironic that prevention education about a fatal disease primarily transmitted by unprotected anal intercourse offers, at the very least, a benign presentation about the ‘lifestyle’ that promotes that sexual practice.” Moreover, she argues that HIV-AIDS prevention agencies must rely heavily on homosexual guidance since “HIV-AIDS does affect homosexuals so disproportionately…” and that this must explain “why so much of the worldwide prevention education is so morally neutral on the issue and so vague about the disease-lifestyle relationship.”

Dr. Laura continues to blast her abrasive views on right and wrong to an audience of 20 million per show. Her success is not without criticism, however. Her extreme positions on homosexuality and women’s rights have spurred anti-Dr. Laura campaigns, such as StopDrLaura.com, supported by NOW and other women’s rights organizations, with the goal of putting an end to her short-lived television career in 2001. Though keeping her off the small screen was a victory for gay rights activists and feminists alike, despite their continued criticism and complaints that her Ph.D. in Physiology doesn’t exactly qualify her to dole out harsh advice on such sensitive subjects, Schlessinger is still going strong. She still spews her bile to millions of listeners weekly, much to the joy of right wingers everywhere.

Quotes:

On Higher Education:

“Hallowed halls of higher education subvert the very meaning of education to give forums to perverts, racists and gender hostilities (which is the definition of a black/Hispanic/women’s/whatever studies curriculum) and biased, leftist, anti-Western Civilization courses … and nothing happens.”

On Feminism:

“The feminist movement has distorted feminine love and giving to husbands and children as oppression and servility. Consequently, women are ‘paranoid’ and ‘hostile’ towards their obligations to their families, and sadly, towards the true desires of their feminine selves/instinct. Women are in inner turmoil because of this clash of brainwashing vs. personal desire.”

More on Feminism:

“Women have been indoctrinated and threatened into an anti-male bias and to see ‘giving’ as ‘losing’ instead of a blessed thing to do when in a covenantal relationship.”

 
Illustration: August J. Pollak