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For years groups on the receiving end of Dr. Laura's tirades and black-and-white judgments about people she's never met and situations she knows nothing about have grumbled as her show's ratings soared: With 14.25 million weekly listeners, she's almost tied with Rush Limbaugh for the nation's most popular radio personality. Not bad for a woman whose naked photos--product of a youthful preconversion liaison with fellow radio host Bill Ballance--are plastered all over the Web. From time to time, a controversy surfaces: The American Library Association, for example, has strongly objected to her smear campaign against them for their opposition to Internet filtering. But it took gays and lesbians to make a fuss loud enough to make the news, and more power to them, I say. Antigay remarks have long been a Dr. Laura staple--the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) first tried to get a meeting with her in 1997, when she referred to homosexuality as a "biological faux pas"--but recently she's stepped up her attacks. Homosexuality is "deviant," a "biological disorder" or "biological error." Gays are sexual predators who do not deserve rights and should not be left alone with children: "How many letters have I read on the air from gay men who acknowledge that a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys?" She advocates "reparative" therapy and uses the Family Research Council, Gary Bauer's outfit, as her main source of information on homosexuality.
With Viacom's Paramount unit preparing a Dr. Laura daytime TV show for September--more than 160 stations, reaching over 90 percent of the nation's households, have already signed up--enough was clearly enough. Gays have fought back with letters, ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, a demonstration at Paramount's gates and a spiffy website, StopDrLaura.com, which claims 14 million hits. In response, Dr. Laura hired a "crisis management" firm, issued a weaselly "apology" ("words that I have used in a clinical [!] context have been perceived as judgment"), fired the crisis management team and relabeled the "apology" a "clarification."
I used to think focusing on Dr. Laura was a waste of time for feminists. After a week of listening to her mad and prurient diatribes, I think we should take a leaf from gay activism and get busy. When Rush Limbaugh burst onto the national political scene, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting got right on his case, even publishing a clever paperback, The Way Things Aren't, dismantling his fake statistics and fractured anecdotes. Maybe it's time for a similar exposé of Dr. Laura, who says women who have abortions are murderers and that mothers always can--and always should--choose not to work, who falsely describes emergency contraception as "dumping out a pregnancy" and causing "disease," and who urges her callers not to help women leave bad marriages because it's all their own fault (see Noy Thrupkaew's article in the May Sojourner for a good introduction). Feminist pickets and protests and demands for equal time might not matter to Dr. Laura's core audience--half lost sheep, half graduates of the Taliban School of Female Deportment--but it would give Paramount another good reason to rethink the show.
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Great news! With much help from generous Nation readers, the Bosnian Initiative Frankfurt, a German human rights group, has succeeded in buying a house to serve as a community center for displaced women and children around Tuzla. If you forgot to send in a check, don't worry--once again, the BIF is asking for donations for its upcoming summer camp for Bosnian refugee children. $150 makes you a "godparent" funding two weeks of vacation for one child, but gifts of any size will be warmly appreciated. Checks made out to Bosnian Initiative Frankfurt can be mailed to me at The Nation, and I will forward them.