When I talk about Dr. Laura, I feel justified in using the same level of tact and understanding that she uses on others. If you find my comments about her less than graceful, then that merely apes what I hear from her.
My objections to Dr. Laura are numerous. I find her hypocritical, egotistical, greedy, and unrealistic - hardly a role model who should instruct others on ethical behaviour.
The nature of her hypocrisy is more subtle than most of her critics realize. Her critics list the following: She decries pornography, yet posed for nude Polaroids when she was younger. She decries divorce, yet divorced her first husband. She decries adultery, yet engaged in at least one affair while she was still married. She promotes family values, yet is estranged from her own mother. She promotes traditions, yet gave her son her last name instead of her husbands'. She demands that women remain virgins until they marry, yet she did not. She demands that women remain unmarried until their late twenties, yet she married at a younger age. She decries working mothers, yet she kept working as a radio host throughout her own son's childhood. She praises strict religious observance, yet abandoned orthodox Judaism after practicing it for years. She decries gossip, but got her radio show in the first place by talking to her management behind her competitions' backs. Yet, I believe that her critics make an error when they claim that this list shows hypocrisy because she responds that she made mistakes when she was young, learned from them, and lives by different values now. Her response is valid. We have to accept that people can learn from their mistakes. However, I believe that she is hypocritical in a somewhat less obvious way. It's true that she lives differently now, but not because her core values have changed; only because her situation has changed. She is an extremely ambitious person. The "mistakes" that she made when she was young resulted in her becoming wealthy (she sold her radio show a few years ago for $72,000,000) and powerful (at her peak, she had the biggest audience of any talk radio host). Before she got her radio show, she had lost a teaching position at USC, she was unemployed, broke, trying to survive by knitting sweaters at home. She started calling into Bill Ballard's radio show and impressed him. Though she was still married to someone she had met in graduate school, she began an affair with Ballard (he's the one who took the Polaroids and, decades later, sold them). She believes that she broke into radio by pure talent, but the fact is that she slept, schemed, and backstabbed her way to the top. Though there is no way to prove it, I believe that she would never have gained a foothold in radio without Ballard's help and never would have gained a prime-time show without torpedoing her competition. And I believe that, if she were in the same position again, she would make the same "mistakes" again to make herself successful. Yet she continually tells other women that they must leave school and quit work if they want to have children; that they should have no sexual relationships until they are 28 years old; that their only priorities are their children and their husbands (in that order). That is hypocrisy in my books.
Her egotism is even more interesting to me. For mysterious reasons, radio talk show listeners love egotists. Rush Limbaugh uses the word, "I" more than any person I know. His show isn't really about politics - it is about Rush. Laura is the same, but the implications are fascinating. It is possible to analyze her advice in the context of her own personal situation throughout her career.
When she was younger and building her career, her advice to everyone was that they should build their careers.
When her son was born, her advice to everyone changed. She began advising everyone to devote themselves to child rearing. You should realize that she had herself sterilized when she was in her twenties. When she married her current husband, she had her tubal ligation reversed. She had a tubal pregnancy that went bad and had to be aborted. When she finally gave birth to her son, it was clear that he would be her only child. Like many mothers who have a single child and have but a single place to invest their maternal instincts, Laura became extremely protective of her son. Many parents return to the church when they have children; Laura did that with a vengeance - she converted to Orthodox Judaism. And she began preaching the virtues of religious orthodoxy to everyone who called her. Her husband stayed home to raise the child when she was working, so her advice to everyone was that women should either stay home to raise their children or find an alternative career that would let them share child rearing with their husbands (as though every woman who called could become a radio talk show host).
When her son approached puberty, it is likely that Laura became concerned about his sexual orientation because she went ballistic about homosexuality - she called homosexuality a "biological mistake" and enraged the gay community. I guess the good doctor (she earned a Ph.D. in physiology from Columbia University - a respectable degree, but nothing do do with clinical psychology or sociobiology) never heard of E. O. Wilson or Richard Dawkins. It never occurred to her that a gay person can increase the survival of his or her own genes by altruism - by helping others who also carry the same genes.
When her son entered his mid-teens, her focus shifted to teenage heterosexuality. In my more extravagant moments, I suspect that Laura is so egotistical that she thought that she could reform the entire American society so that it would be safe for her own son. If no teenager girl ever has sex with any teenage boy, then her son would never impregnate a girl or contract a sexually transmitted disease.
When her son left home, her personal situation changed again. When children grow older, the power relationship in marriages changes - men are under threat of losing access to their children if the marriage dissolves, so the woman has the upper hand if she has married a man who cares about his children, but this threat is lost when children become old enough to maintain contact on their own. Sure enough, Laura's advice to women shifted from making their children their first priority to making their husbands' happiness their first priority at exactly this point in her life. And, guess what! She did not need the church to help her raise her son any longer, so she abandoned her orthodoxy. And, as surely as night follows day, she stopped advising her callers to adhere to strict religious observance. There was an immediate decrease in the frequency that she advised women to consult their ministers, priests, and rabbis. Then her son dropped out of university so now she told parents that they do not have to support and encourage their children to pursue post-secondary education.
Most recently, he joined the military so now she advises women to encourage their own children to enlist. It is no accident that the more Americans support their military, the safer her own son will be.
I predict, with some confidence, that when her son gets married her advice will change again. Until now, Laura has always stated that people must sever their ties with their parents and cling to their spouses after marriage. Don't forget that she was estranged from her own mother, so this advice mirrored her own marriage. I predict that when her son marries, she will start extolling the need for mother-in-laws to impart their wisdom to their children and remain involved in their lives. I'd sure hate for my daughters to have Dr. Laura for a mother-in-law.
Laura's critics and fans alike have noted that she does not listen to her callers' problems in detail - that she cuts them off as soon as she has formed an opinion, right or wrong. But few critics have noted that the reason that she does not need to hear their problems is that she knows what advice she is going to give even before she has spoken to them. She is going to tell them whatever applies to her own personal situation. For a therapist to give a patient advice based on the therapist's situation rather than the patient's can hardly be considered ethical.
Dr. Laura's greed knows no bounds. Rich as she is, she loves to get every additional buck possible out of her listeners. She is always hawking something, from her own beaded jewelry, to whatever product she can endorse. She proclaims loudly (and truthfully) that one hundred percent of the proceeds from her jewelry sales goes to charity - but I would be surprised if her accountants failed to leverage significant tax advantages for her from any charity that she touches.
Last year, I, like many of her listeners, was particularly startled to hear her giving her personal endorsement in an advertisement for an Internet-based dating service. For years, she had been condemning people who used the Internet to find romance. Now, suddenly she was endorsing one? When questioned, her response was that she had personally checked out the service that she was endorsing and had established that they did a much better job of matching people up than all the other services - as though she had personally investigated the other services and found them lacking. It looks to me like her self-proclaimed ethics are for sale to the highest bidder.
Finally, consider the practicality of her advice. As nearly as I can tell from what I have heard over the years, a woman should complete university and start a career; remain a virgin until she is 28 years old when she quits her career to marry; have one or two children; stay home for more than 18 years; have sex with her husband as often as he asks, even if it is more than once a day; and maybe resume her career at the age of forty if she wants. We have no idea what a woman should do after her mid-fifties because Laura has just reached that age. Men, on the other hand, should never have sex until they are married, presumably at about the age of 30 because they should never marry a woman older or much younger than themselves; find a career that will pay enough to support a family on his sole income, but never require that he travel on business anywhere that he will encounter other women, never work shifts that interfere with family time, never work overtime. Divorced couples with children should live in the same neighborhood, never even date other people until all the children have left home, and remain unemployed rather than moving to take a job elsewhere. You can decide for yourself how practical her advice is.
My wife can't stand to hear her voice on the radio for even a minute. Personally, I find her as entertaining as any clown in a circus. It's just a little sad that she can't look in a mirror and see the greasepaint on her own face. (There, Harold, how's that for a sentence lacking in grace and tact? About as tactful as Dr. Laura telling women that that they are shack-up honeys who are making themselves into unpaid prostitutes and should demand payment from their lovers, I'd say.)