Dr. Laura Falls Victim to the Thought Police

“Dr. Laura’s a fascist,” said a young acquaintance of mine recently. “She got what she deserved.”

This is a commonly held belief, especially among homosexuals who fling the “f” word around like a Frisbee. But, hey, it’s a gambit that seems to work for them. Now that the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, or GLAAD, has finally succeeded in booting blondbombast Laura Schlessinger off the air--Paramount TV canceled her long-embattled show--gay panjandrums everywhere are dancing in their cubicles singing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead” at the top of their Munchkin lungs.

Yes indeed, it’s another win for the good gays, the speech patrol, the arbiters of decency who have proved once again that the 1st Amendment doesn’t apply when what’s being said hurts someone’s feelings.

You can’t utter things like “gays are a biological mistake” and make it in television these days. It simply isn’t done. You can’t diss the gay lobby and get away with it. Not even if you’re a Boy Scout.

Because, you see, we’re living in an age in which words have lost their meanings. Take “fascist,” for example. Once upon a time, you were a fascist if you favored gassing and incinerating Jews en masse or shooting communists and anyone else who disagreed with you. Today, however, a fascist is a person who subscribes to any of a whole list of beliefs that the rabid left has made politically leprous, to wit: the Rosenbergs were guilty; Rigoberta Menchu told some whoppers; “disability” is not an academic discipline; Marx was wrong; Bush won Florida; Al Sharpton is a charlatan; beef is good food; and the zinger, homosexuality is abnormal.

Times have changed, and history has gotten lost in the process. This is not surprising, since facts, dates and Western civilization are distressingly unfashionable in the classroom. Our youngsters are merely being inculcated in what art critic Robert Hughes called “the culture of complaint.” By instinct, they are outraged by symbolic transgressions, the meanings and consequences of which they know little or nothing.

Consequently, Schlessinger is a fascist because she thinks homosexuality is Mother Nature’s boo-boo. What’s more, she’s lost her television program for exercising her 1st Amendment right to say so. This is astounding when you think about it. It’s not as if Schlessinger said that she thought gays should be forced to wear bar codes on their forearms or that they should be put to death in labor camps. She simply said something that science may one day prove to be true. One could make the argument, after all, that gays are evolutionarily maladaptive in that we tend not to propagate the species. Nature, for lack of a better word, probably didn’t intend us this way.

Big deal. Of course it may be the word “mistake” that’s the problem, in which case we could use “anomaly” instead--as in, not the norm. Either way, this doesn’t make us evil. Nor does it make us undeserving of civil rights. It’s just a difference of opinion, and one with which, as it happens, many people agree. In fact, if you accept as fact the Judeo-Christian tenets expressed in the Old Testament, then homosexuality is a sin. That doesn’t make you a fascist.

It’s truly distressing when abuses of language, whether malapropic or unconstitutional, force anyone of sound mind to defend the pseudo-doctor Laura. She’s the worst kind of periwigged arriviste, who probably would have sunk her show all by herself had GLAAD not strong-armed potential advertisers into reneging on their endorsements.

But thanks to the hard-driving agitprop of her enemies, she has been given far more credence than she deserves, and we’ve come one step closer to consigning the Constitution, along with the dictionary, to ye olde dustbin of history.