Some family values. Your 77-year-old mother lies
dead and decomposing for two
months in a condominium not far from the radio
complex where you sternly
hector millions about how to live a moral life
while attacking those who "deviate."
And you never bothered once to inquire how your
own mom was doing? Maybe send
a minion over to knock on the door once in a
while? For two months, the mail piled up,
the condo fees went unpaid, and you, successful
syndicated radio advice guru "Dr. Laura"
Schlessinger, never noticed these and other worrying
signs that, as the police suggested,
your mother may have been murdered?
Of course, when you finally found out, after the
building manager called the police,
you were "horrified by the tragic circumstances"
of her death.
But was it really appropriate to add, self-servingly,
that she "died as she chose to live,
alone and isolated." You said, "My mother shut
all her family out of her life over the years,
though we made several futile attempts to stay
connected."
Those are not kind words to speak of one's dead
mother. Ties it all in a neat little bow,
doesn't it? Italian-born Yolanda Schlessinger
was "Sophia Loren-like," and you found her
difficult. In a 1998 interview, you claim a childhood
"that would curl your hair."
Welcome to reality: Good family values don't come
easily. Problem is, you've made it
sound as if they do. You are one of the leading
conservative sloganeers who arrogantly
claim a lock on the moral high ground while deriding
those, such as homosexuals, who dare
to "deviate" from your "norm."
Using the title "doctor," earned in physiology
rather than medicine or psychology, has lent
a false credibility to your depictions of homosexuality
as a "biological error," a "dysfunction"
and a "deviancy" -- words that encourage hate
crimes.
Worse, honoring and caring for one's parents is
at the heart of your philosophy, as spelled out
in your own presumptuous 1998 book, "The 10 Commandments:
The Significance of God's
Laws in Everyday Life." You wrote: "God's commandment
of honoring parents is basically the
message that parents are a conduit of God. Any
profanity or harm to the parent is as if
we've profaned God."
You wrote, "By honoring our parents, we learn
to honor God. By honoring God
we become decent human beings." You obviously
failed that test.
"Even bad parents deserve to be honored if only
at a minimal level," you wrote.
Thus surely "honor thy father and thy mother"
intends something more than letting a
septuagenarian woman go months at a time without
even a drive-by visit from her daughter.
You also wrote: "There is often a profound unwillingness
to give anything to a parent perceived
as being unloving or undeserving.... That avoidance
is part of the mentality that says, 'If it doesn't
obviously serve me, I won't do it and I shouldn't
have to!' " Apparently, that is your mentality.
But you, whose shallow perceptions are laced with
bursts of meanness and contempt for others,
will no doubt continue as a hot media product
and a darling of the religious conservatives.
"A positive voice for positive values without
equal in our time," gushed the Rev. Robert Schuller.
What can we draw from all this? That family relationships
are exceedingly complicated and often
painful. That maintaining true "family values"
is not a matter simply of attending church, being
heterosexual and mouthing platitudes, but demands
humility, resiliency and deep compassion.
That religious texts like the Bible can provide
inspiring lessons in the hands of sincere teachers
and also can be used as clubs by the cynical
and ambitious.
And finally, that the "Dr. Laura" show typifies
the dangerous hypocrisy of those who build
profitable and politically potent empires on
the basis of claiming a monopoly on simplistic answers
to complex problems. The guilt and shame they
induce in those who might resist their nostrums is
loathsome, made more so when they themselves
so casually ignore them.