I’d like to riff off one of her secondary points here, though.  In the course of developing her point, she mentions the recent dust-up over Dr. Laura Schlessinger.  She – rightly – says that Dr. Laura made a huge error in judgement and taste and is now unsurprisingly having to end her radio show.  What cheered me, though, and I say this as a conservative, is her characterization of Dr. Laura as sometimes “flippant and even cruel.”  It’s about time somebody said it.

People who call Dr. Laura’s show are generally in desperate straits.  Moreover, they generally know that they have goofed up, made poor moral choices, and found themselves where they are as a result.  It’s also pretty clear from the ways in which the host treats them that she, in her championing of What’s Right above all else in the world, relishes the opportunity to rub their noses in their plight.  She routinely tells people they are utter moral failures.  She will stress how difficult it’s going to be for them to turn things around in their lives,  Then she’ll pause for effect (As someone who does some radio, her deliberate use of dead air has always unnerved me) and stress it again.  I’ve even heard her laugh at people’s plights.  She has no room for even the slightest bit of compassion for, say, someone whose live-in lover of fifteen years has left.  The couple wasn’t married, and in the doctor’s eyes, that trumps all other aspects of the situation.

Now, having said the foregoing, I sometimes find myself considering the possibility that the reason she comes off like such a buzz-saw of callousness is that, in this age of pervasive moral relativism, we find the asserting of absolutes too bracing for our consideration.  In our postmodern culture, we tend to play patty-cake in situations where moral clarity is called for.

Dr. Laura’s overarching moral code is not the problem.  For all her training and insight into others, she cannot see that she has a markedly undeveloped aspect to her own personality, that being the ability to cut one’s fellow human being a little slack for being human.