Any pain she feels is self inflicted. Nobody did anything to her. She caused the mess herself. She was not unfairly attacked.
I don’t think she’s intelligent enough to do so.
She has the right to say what she wants on her show with very few exceptions. People who don’t like what she says have the right to say they don’t like what she says. She has the right to say they’re wrong. And so on and so on. That’s how this works. It’s that simple.
Please show that: there is an organized campaign against her based on her statements last week, and that it’s based on lies and misrepresentations. Also please demonstrate that she has a Constitutional right to broadcast her views on the radio.
Ten years ago there was a campaign against her based on her comments about gay people. (Examples here.) Some advertisers stopped advertising on her show and stations did drop her in response to that campaign. It’s worth pointing out again that she was probably talking about her experience a decade ago and not about any kind of current campaign. The episode we’re talking about happened last week. That’s not enough time for a boycott to do anything.
The problem here is that “Dr.” Laura, like many other ill-informed mouth-breathers before her, is using “First Amendment,” as some kind of a synonym for “speech without consequences.” It would be fair to use that shorthand to mean “speech without legal consequences,” although even then it would be shorthand, not an accurate statement. But as numerous others have pointed out, there is no right to be insulated from being thought a fool after saying something foolish. And there is no right to being immunized against adverse employment actions when your employers discover they have hired a fool.
What if, instead of the fateful caller, it had been a white person complaining of being fired for asking a black coworker “how come you can say ‘nigger’ but I can’t ?”
Would Dr. Laura have launched into much the same “white men can’t jump/Obama/HBO/‘nigger’, ‘nigger’, ‘nigger’’” riff, and then recommend the caller get a lawyer with experience in Constitutional law?
Or would she done her usual “Quit feeling sorry for yourself” scold?
What would Dr. Laura tell Dr. Laura?
“I’m not retiring, I’m not quitting,” that means YOU FIRED!!! And good riddance! I hate her and hate her show. I can’t listen to her for 5 minutes without getting angry and yelling at the radio.
She’s hot tho. Or rather, she was, dunno about nowadays.
She’s like 75 years old … if you’re into that kind of thing.
I guess her view is “if you don’t like what I’m saying, debate me, or ignore me (i.e. change the radio channel).”, but should not try to shut her up.
I assume she doesn’t see any difference from folks who try to convince her sponsers to pull their support, to those who would push her off the street corner soap box.
I think she’s wrong, but there you go. The free market can be pretty cut throat.
This. Exactly this. She wants government to protect HER right to say anything she wants and she wants the same government to stop anyone from saying “bad stuff” against her.
She’s a hypocrite. If she lost her so called “show” good riddance.
Well, no. She’s not, unless you can show me instances where she’s tried to boycott or otherwise suppress someone else’s speech. Her position seems to be that she can say foolish things, and no one should take any action against her.
I don’t get the sense that she’s saying no one should say anything critical of her; I get the sense she’s saying no one should take actions calculated to threaten her job.
What would make her a hypocrite is showing that she took action against someone else based on their speech. (Which she may have, but it hasn’t been mentioned so far).
As someone has already pointed out, how is the Dr. Laura situation different from the firestorm that the Dixie Chicks created when they criticized President Bush? Didn’t radio stations stop playing their music?
That’s an excellent analogy.
Of course, when that happened, other commentators raised concerns not unlike Schlessinger’s – I seem to recall Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) saying that the radio ban was like Nazi Germany and the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s. According to her, it was a “chilling message to people that they ought to shut up.”
And Senator John McCain (R-AZ) claimed that the Dixie Chick’s First Amendment rights were violated. So… go figure.
Interestingly enough, the Board’s members were not always so sanguine about speech having consequences.
In this thread in 2007, here’s what I said about the US woman’s bridge team after they held up a sign saying, “We did not vote for Bush,” and got suspended by their organization:
Many other posters disagreed with me at the time. It sure is nice to see my views on the general issue coming into acceptance.
And no – no. I won’t hear any objections about the unanimous opinions now being the result of disliking Dr. laura and her message, and the mixed opinion in 2007 arising from the fact that the message then was anti-Bush, and therefore laudable. Dopers take positions based on facts; they just don’t do things like that.
Here’s a letter Micheal Moore wrote to Bill Timmins, President of the Aladdin Casino, after Linda Ronstadt was thrown off stage for dedicating a song to him:
So it seems that Mr. Moore was also confused about the First Amendment. How unfortunate.
Do you think Michael Moore is considered an unimpeachable moral authority around here, Bricker? It’s not 2002. From what I can tell, a lot of people regard him as a jerk who is correct about some issues.
I would say that there’s obviously an argument to be had about whether these kind of public reactions to Dr. Laura, or the Dixie Chicks or the US Bridge team are productive or healthy for society, and whether the specific incidents of speech warrant the kind of reactions they get. What isn’t really debatable is whether these actions are legal. Of course they are. Spare me your sanctimony.
But apparently tu quoque remains fair game.
I thought everyone knew you couldn’t shout nigger in a crowded radio station.
Perhaps when he gets on national television to bitch about the right he perceives are being curtailed, you can start a thread about him.
Um. You do realize that the “actions calculated to threaten her job” that she is complaining about are people “say[ing] anything critical of her”, right? Specifically, they’re saying critical things about her to her sponsors.
So yeah. By your own definition: hypocrite city.