San Francisco needs Dr. Laura

When Big Bad GLAAD Got Mad, Laura Schlessinger Did Not Back Down

My hometown could have used someone like Dr. Laura Schlessinger about 25 years ago. Just one person with her moral courage speading regularly on local radio or TV. against the homosexual agenda, may have arrested the decline that put San Francisco where it is today.

I was born in San Francisco in 1958, and raised in the city and in a nearby suburb during the 1960s and 70s. Public homosexuality was not a part of the world in which I was raised.

This was not because my parents were overly protective. It was because the society around us was not yet thoroughly corrupted.

Herb Caen, the late liberal gossip columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, famously called his adopted city (he was really from Sacramento) "Baghdad by the Bay." Truth is, San Francisco, as the natives knew it, was really more like Pittsburgh with an ocean view. The city's core population consisted of middle- and working-class families, who were as ethnically diverse as any city on the continent, but who universally ascribed to the American work ethic, and traditional Judeo-Christian morality.

Flotsam and Jetsam

It is true that over the years San Francisco was subjected to periodic migrations of eccentric and dissolute people. But they were always temporary migrations, and except for perhaps a year or two around the time of the Gold Rush of 1849, they never dominated the culture and life of the city.

The town I was born in was founded by a Franciscan friar. Its first real building was a Roman Catholic Church. Its first principal business was the conversion of souls.

When the old Italian neighborhood of North Beach burst out with Beatniks in the 1950s, inspired to travel there from afar by the writings of Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the roots of the city were still firmly embedded in mission soil. Many of the Haight-Ashbury hippies, who followed the beatniks by a decade, were nothing more than college-age rock-and-roll fans drawn West by the prospect of a summer of free concerts by the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane.

These evanescent movements were just flotsam and jetsam washing over the rockhard foundation of San Francisco life: the broad mass of ordinary people who continued to go to work or school each weekday morning, and to their church each weekend, and to pass down to their children the same unchanging values that civilized peoples have embraced for millennia.

The homosexual movement, which came in earnest to San Francisco sometime in the second half of the 1970s, was completely different. It was on organized and sustained attempt to overthrow the very value system that forms the foundation of any great city: the values that sustain family life.

Soon weak-spirited San Francisco politicians were being pressured into public policy decisions that diverged ever further from common sense. It was what the homosexual "community"-excuse me, the "gay" communitydemanded.

When homosexuals with suppressed immune systems started dying from formerly rare diseases, city officials treated the crisis like a human rights problem rather than a public health disaster. Bath houses remained open too long; practicing homosexuals continued to be accepted as volunteer blood donors.

The city government and city schools regressed from leaning over backwards to accommodate the increasing demands of the homosexual movement, to adopting those demands as their own agenda to actively advance.

Blasted to Pieces

The few public figures who did stand up for traditional values were shouted down. I cannot recall a single columnist for any local newspaper, or any local radio personality, or any local television personality, who consistently spoke up for the traditional Judeo@-Christian understanding of marriage or for the ancient moral prohibition on homosexual activity

Once a city of dreams, San Francisco became a nightmare for conscientious parents. The fight for the soul of the city, never really fought, was lost. E@ery element of society was twisted around to create a plausible framework for the patently implausible: that two people of the same gender ought to have sex with one another.

Parents who still embraced the traditional values that built San Francisco-and built America-became curious anomalies. The cultural bedrock of the community, blasted to pieces, was reduced to something as shifting and insubstantial as the undeveloped sand dunes that greeted the Franciscans in 1776.

This is why San Francisco could have used Dr. Laura in 1976. She would have told the obvious truth-and it would have made a difference. No one could have frightened her into shutting up.

Laura Schlessinger is making a difference now, on the national scene, through her syndicated radio show. For that she has earned the enmity of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a group that presents itself as defending the interests of "the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community."

These defenders of the transgender demanded last week that the Paramount Television Group terminate its plans to syndicate a Dr. Laura television show slated to start this fall.