Originally appeared in June 2000 in the Chicago Free Press.
Anyone can offer reasons for being hostile toward gays, but advice-show maven Dr. Laura Schlessinger offers too many reasons, reasons that collide with each other and result in incoherence. If being gay is truly a "biological error," why would she urge us to seek psychotherapy in the hope of reversing it?
AS MOST GAYS AND LESBIANS KNOW, Paramount Studios is planning to produce a syndicated television program hosted by social conservative advice maven "Dr. Laura" Schlessinger.
The battle is currently joined between Paramount and Schlessinger who hope to make lots of money, and a number of gay activist groups who hope to discourage potential advertisers so the program will not make money. This is all fair in the economic marketplace.
Schlessinger's strident hostility to homosexuals is well-documented.
Here is a sample quotation:
"I'm sorry, hear it one more time perfectly clearl y. If you're gay or a lesbian, it's a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex. ... The error is in your inability to relate sexually intimately, in a loving way to a member of the opposite sex - it is a biological error."
But the problem here for Schlessinger is that while anyone can offer reasons for their hostility to gays, she offers too many.
At one point or another she has said that homosexuality is a "biological error," that gays are sexually "deviant" and should seek some sort of change or "reparative" psychotherapy, and that as an advocate of Biblical morality she views homosexuality as just plan wrong.
The problem she faces, or rather declines to face, is not only that her reasons are largely discredited, but that it is impossible for anyone to hold all three views simultaneously.
For instance, there are no good replicated scientific studies showing that gays are biologically different from heterosexuals. Schlessinger, who claims to have a doctorate in "physiology," has never pointed to any such studies.
Then too, Schlessinger's claim founders on the very existence of bisexuals. Bisexual men who can presumably relate sexually to other men can also relate "normally" - "sexually intimately, in a loving way" to the opposite sex. So their sexuality is at once biologically erroneous and not erroneous.
But most significantly, if homosexuality were in fact a biological error, there would be little point in telling gays to seek any sort of psychotherapy for it. We do not normally tell people who have diabetes, or sickle cell anemia or a defective heart valve to get psychotherapy to fix their biological error. Why do so with homosexuality?
Schlessinger's second argument is that gay men are in some way "deviant" and should seek psychotherapy to change their sexual desires so they can relate "normally" to women.
Increasingly, of course, this argument is confined almost exclusively to the religious right. By now most people realize that such therapies have little effect and are by-and-large fraudulent.
"Change therapies" seem to work only for people who are bisexual or primarily heterosexual to begin with and few or none of these people say they have lost all homosexual desire. So no change has really occurred. The whole enterprise is a vast semantic deception.
Someone might ask why relating "in a loving way" to the opposite sex is psychologically superior to relating "in a loving way" to the same sex. But Schlessinger seems to have no answer for this because she seems unable to imagine anyone relating lovingly to the same sex.
Sometimes Schlessinger sounds like a girl who just cannot get a date for Saturday night.
Schlessinger's third argument is that homosexuality is somehow immoral. But this does not comport easily with the notion that gays should get therapy.
Psychological problems, pathologies, neuroses and so forth are not normally evaluated in terms of morality. For instance, we do not say that people who are claustrophobic or chronically depressed or have obsessive/compulsive disorder are immoral, so it is not clear why gays should be evaluated in those terms
Nor, to recur to Schlessinger's first argument, do we normally evaluate "biological errors," defects and so forth in moral terms.
Schlessinger usually says she bases her morality on her religious commitment to Orthodox Judaism. All well and good, but then she has no arguments to offer to people who do not share her religious commitment.
Then too, if Schlessinger's morality comes the Hebrew Bible (what Christians call the "Old Testament"), she has no grounds for hostility to lesbians. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is there any passage criticizing, condemning or even mentioning lesbians.
To be sure, there is one brief passage (Genesis 3:16) in which the ancient god Yahweh implants heterosexual desire in women. First Yahweh increased the pain of labor and childbirth. Then and only then he condemned women to feel lust for men so they cannot evade that pain by abstaining from sex with men. In other words, female heterosexual desire is part of a punishment.
It is hard to believe Schlessinger could view this as much of a recommendation for female heterosexuality, but it is all there is.
Given the virulence and offensiveness of Schlessinger's views, many gays want to keep her from having a platform on national television. That is one possible option. But there is another.
Many Americans who still feel uneasy about gays and lesbians probably hold some less intense version of Schlessinger's views.
Since Schlessinger's views are so obviously false or self-contradictory, it could be useful to have her making those claims in such an easily rebuttable form.
By showing people that Schlessinger's views are wholly without merit, we can, without putting them on the defensive, show them the same thing about their own.