Further Reading

Pick One
Who Is 'Dr. Laura?'  ** That Evil Study

May 2000

That Evil Study

Dr. Laura has weighed in periodically on gay issues from the beginning of her broadcast career, retreating over the years from a position of grudging tolerance. In 1997, after her description of homosexuality as a "biological faux pas" drew the ire of GLAAD, a meeting (the first of two) between Schlessinger and GLAAD's Joan Garry led to a series of rocky interactions.

But all-out war between Schlessinger and gay activists erupted only after Schlessinger aired a series of jeremiads, beginning March 23, 1999, about a paper called "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples," published in The Psychological Bulletin, the scholarly journal of the American Psychological Association.

This 31-page overview of the results of three dozen peer-reviewed studies and other material examining the effects of sex between adults and children appeared in the July 1998 issue. Although right-wing condemnation of the study was immediately forthcoming, Schlessinger caught up with it many months later when alerted by a listener. The study was crafted by three academic psychologists: Bruce Rind of Temple University, Philip Tromovitch of the University of Pennsylvania, and Robert Bauserman of the University of Michigan. Its controversial conclusion was that adult-child sex was not invariably traumatic, and that its "negative effects were neither pervasive nor typically intense."

Some readers might have interpreted this finding as good news that child molestation might be less devastating than previously thought. To Schlessinger, it suggested a conspiracy to normalize sex between adults and children. "The next time some pervert gets caught with a child," she said, "I'm sure this is the first study that his scum lawyer will drag out to defend his actions." With typical libelous overkill, Schlessinger falsely claimed on the air that "two of the three authors have written and traveled all over the world in pedophilia circles to promote the notion of adult-child sex."

Schlessinger's website tellingly recommends the work of militant crackpot Judith Reisman, a former songwriter for the children's television show "Caption Kangaroo." A notoriously biased social research operative of the American Family Association, Reisman has made a career of portraying sex researcher Alfred Kinsey as a twisted gay man who facilitated child sexual abuse. Schlessinger accepts the notion promoted by Reisman, propagandists of the Family Research Council, and other right-wing pseudo-scholars that a large percentage of the gay population preys upon children, and that child molestation is essentially a gay problem.

Reeling under an avalanche of criticism, the American Psychological Association disowned the Rind team's publication. When, fueled by homophobic input from Schlessinger, a Congressional resolution was passed in July 1999 condemning the study-- a move fraught with problematic First Amendment implications-- GLAAD was silent. GLAAD's chronology of its relations with Dr. Laura states only that from April through August 1999, "Schlessinger escalates her rhetoric against homosexuality and begins quoting material from the Family Research Council."