July 8, 2000

A Feminist Cure for Dr. Laura’s Bad Medicine

Radical Women is here today to lend our voice to the roar of protest over KING TV’s plan to sign up Dr. Laura, that two-bit hypocrite of the far-right, for a show.

I am proud to say that Radical Women are the kind of BAD women Dr. Laura warns her listeners against. We are feminists and socialists. We’re for sexual freedom, abortion on demand, free 24-hour-a-day childcare, and equal pay for equal work. We are so radical we even think housewives should be paid for their labor in the home. Shocking, isn’t it?

We also believe that if two mommies or two daddies want to adopt a child and give him or her a safe, loving home--more power to them. We think if two grown-up people want to get married, they should be able to even if they have matching genitalia.

Yes, we are the kind of people Dr. Laura loves to hate. According to Dr. L., everything wrong with this country can be laid at our door. If only we knew how to behave as we used to in the "good ole days" like those wonderful 1950s, before women, people of color, and lesbians and gays took their demands to live as full human beings to the streets!

You remember the ‘50s, don’t you? Remember how great everything was when all us specially oppressed people knew our place? There was a vicious apartheid system in the South, women could hardly get birth control let alone abortions, and being openly gay meant you risked being locked up in a mental institution. What fun we all used to have in Dr. Laura’s Perverted World of Injustice!

Dr. Laura loves to rant on about how immoral our society has become. Well, Laurie baby, let me tell you discrimination is immoral. Saying that Matthew Shepherd, a gay man executed by homophobes in Wyoming, was responsible for his own death—that’s immoral. Using racist code words to paint hard-working Black women as welfare queens—that’s immoral. Beating up on single, working mothers—that’s immoral. Laying your puritanical, sexist guilt-trips on young women—that’s immoral.

The problem with the United States, my dear Dr. Laura, is not that the Black civil rights movement, the feminist movement, or the lesbian and gay movement went "too far." The problem is we did not go far enough.

Think about it, people. Why is it that we’re still out here fighting idiot right-wingers with hate-filled agendas thirty years after the Stonewall riot? Because the source of these political throw-backs—the capitalist system itself—is still in place and huge, wealthy corporations like Paramount are willing to bankroll a sexist, racist, homophobe like Dr. Laura so she can pry open the closet door and shove us back in. The system fears us because our demands for freedom and respect threaten the whole enchilada—the nuclear family and women’s oppression within the family—which are the foundation on which capitalism rests.

I say let’s take the offensive! Let’s demand that King TV drop Dr. Laura and replace her with something we can be proud of: real role models of working class lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgenderal people on prime time TV. And let’s keep on fighting for our unconditional freedom.

Civil Rights Forever!

Dr. Laura Never!