Dr. Laura: The Furor, the Blather

Fat chance. But if the New York chapter of the National Organization for Women is ever up for a TV talk show, I’d lobby against it. I’d picket, march, shout, stamp my feet, give out growly sound bites and throw a snit because those people don’t deserve to have a regular forum on TV. No way. Absolutely not. I forbid it. Why?

They tee me off.

Wouldn’t I be advocating that NOW’s New Yorkers be denied the same free speech on publicly owned airwaves granted other Americans? You and the American Civil Liberties Union would bring that up. But no. I just believe that TV should be used in more productive ways, such as expressing opinions that coincide with mine.

All right, scratch that. Time to get real.

Which is what Nancy Millar, president of NOW’s New York chapter, wasn’t doing Monday afternoon when she stumbled her way through an interview on the Fox News Channel with Neil Cavuto, who had her on the defensive even though he could not have been more polite. Sinking in her own platitudes, Millar was unable to give cogent answers to any of the logical questions Cavuto asked about her chapter’s support of Monday’s demonstrations in Manhattan by gay and lesbian activists demanding that WCBS-TV there back away from plans to carry a new syndicated talk show from Paramount Television Group.

“She’s using her radio show and her newspaper column to preach hate, and I think that’s an egregious use of that space,” Millar said of the hot-button star of the TV series set to make a September debut.

Laura Schlessinger.

Yes, her, the advice tyrant who is much easier to condemn than defend. You know, radio’s screw-you-if-you’re-different Dr. Laura, the hard-boiled bully know-it-all who is said to believe that gays and lesbians are merely quasi-earthlings. If only they’d accept conversion to the human race. But they won’t, gosh darn. So give them 40 tongue lashings, says the Lizzie Borden of talk radio.

For some time, gay and lesbian activists have been lobbying advertisers to withdraw support from Dr. Laura’s planned TV series--Procter & Gamble is one of the major sponsors that has buckled so far--and her syndicated radio show, which reaches an estimated 18 million listeners. Many homosexuals took it personally when she declared on the air that they were “deviants” and “biological errors.” When she later tried to backtrack, saying she used those definitions “in a clinical context,” she made gays and lesbians sound like microbes under glass.

Left to her own devices, in other words, Dr. Laura inevitably impales herself on her own spiked blather. As when she informed CNN’s Larry King recently that it’s “criminal and immoral” for a woman to intentionally bring a child into the world “with no father.”

Just criminal? Just immoral? Why not just go ahead and call these single mothers Satanic? Or deviant? Or biologically errant?

Every time I tune in Mistress Laura, she’s in dominatrix mode, lecturing or cutting off in mid-sentence a pathetic caller (probably wearing handcuffs and a leather hood) who later ends up thanking her for receiving the whipping she administers. No question, she is a piece of work.

Which is no reason, however, to bar her from the airwaves, one of the few places on the planet where being deviant and biologically errant can land you an acre in Bel-Air.

Not that her fellow Americans aren’t entitled to peacefully protest her opinions by pressuring sponsors, stations and Paramount to shun her. Just as protest movements of all shades--from civil rights groups to the Catholic Church to the Moral Majority to the Parents Television Council--have wielded boycotts on behalf of altering the course of broadcasting.

Yet there is something unsavory and abortive about doing it here, as if Dr. Laura (who doesn’t advocate mayhem or violence) were not entitled to her views, however creepy. And the public were not entitled to hear them.

In fact, Dr. Laura and TV are perfect for each other.

Tell me, please, if she can be worse than Sally Jessy Raphael, who specializes in piously comforting troubled kids by exposing their neuroses and dysfunctions to strangers watching from their homes. Or Jenny Jones, who fronts the only daytime talk show that can boast of a fatality. Or Jerry Springer and his underclass of chair-swinging freaks. Or Ricki Lake, who lowers your IQ just by osmosis.

I found Ricki while channel-hopping the other day and was amazed to discover that she was still on the air, uninhibited by her own dimness and the cobwebs of decadence tightening around her like a corset. I thought she went out with Howdy Doody.

So I say Dr. Laura belongs in this bedlam, which can always accommodate another inmate.

NOW’s Millar doesn’t agree. Each time Cavuto lobbed her a question, she responded as if dodging a bean ball. Lots of people say “hateful, wacky things” on the air, he noted. Howard Stern is one, I’m thinking about then. So is Jerry Falwell. So why target Dr. Laura? Cavuto asked.

Because, said Millar, she has been “particularly offensive. She hasn’t apologized.” Oh. She added that Dr. Laura’s views on gays and lesbians “aren’t supported by mental health associations in any way.” Oh.

“Someone has the power to listen to her or not listen to her, right?” Cavuto asked. “Right,” Millar responded. “And if I find her offensive, I don’t have to watch her this fall, right?” he asked. “That’s true,” she replied. But Dr. Laura “doesn’t have a constitutional right to have a television show,” Millar added a bit later.

This was getting nowhere, with Cavuto ultimately wondering “where you draw the line” governing who should and should not be on the air, and Millar unable to say.

Compare the cases, meanwhile, of Dr. Laura and another public orator who’s having a bad year, Atlanta Braves pitcher John Rocker. He intimates some of the same things about gays and lesbians while taking swipes at various groups in Sports Illustrated, and he’s censured and berated for weeks by sportscasting’s emerging class of moral cops. And then he’s ultimately banished to the minor leagues for his behavior (although the team insists his demotion Monday was unrelated to his most recent outburst, a nose-to-nose with the author of the magazine article that initially got him in trouble).

Yet Dr. Laura says it, and she gets a TV show. I know, it hurts. It stinks. It’s not fair. But it’s America.

Get over it.

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached by e-mail at calendar.letters@latimes.com.