Christine M. Flowers: Dr. Laura Schlessinger is out

SHE shouldn't have said it.

She's been talking publicly for more than 20 years. She should know better. If you say the "n-word," you're in big trouble.

So Dr. Laura Schlessinger made a boo-boo, and now she's hanging up the microphone after more than two decades on the air. I'm sad to see her go, because I think a lot of wisdom came from that bleached-blond, bony little package.

But I'm even sadder that she let herself get done in by the usual liberal mobs that traffic in hypocrisy and twist the words of people they hate, while giving a pass to people they like.

As in when a New Black Panther wants to kill the "white crackers" (a bit repetitive, right?) it's just a crazy fellow making noise, not racism.

But when a highly educated Ph.D. who's trying to make a point about the power we give words uses a distasteful and historically disgusting word, she's not only a racist but deserves to die. Don't believe me? Put "Dr. Laura" into a Google search, and you'll see just how murderous some blogozombies are.

Dr. Laura made a big mistake by making herself an easy target for the lynch-mob mentality that reigns among certain pop-culture commentators from the fabulists at MSNBC to the frustrated journalists at Media Matters to the worker bees serving Queen Arianna at the Huffington Post.

Yes, the same sort of thing happens on the conservative side of the aisle, but two wrongs are still wrong even when it's on the right.

My colleague Fatimah Ali wrote a good column this week addressing the whole Dr. Laura conundrum, criticizing her for using the n-word while at the same time trying to explain why it's different when black people use the phrase themselves.

I agree with Fatimah that Schlessinger was out of line to use the despicable word even once, let alone a dozen times, on the air. It was disrespectful to her listeners and beneath the level of someone who puts herself out there as a radio life coach.

But I respectfully disagree that we should even try to justify using a word that, apparently, had a well-publicized burial some years ago. If black people want to keep using a term in private that drags up the deepest memories of slavery and Jim Crow, that's their right, I guess.

But let's not excuse it. And let's not pretend that it's a valued cultural artifact, like when we took bad grammar and dignified it with the term "ebonics." Just because I'm white dago doesn't mean I don't know a racial slur when I see one.

But there's a bigger issue here, one that has little to do with phonics and everything to do with phonies. Because frankly, that's what these aggrieved critics of Schlessinger really are. They pretend to be all about tolerance and big tents and diversity of thought.

But when it comes to other people's attachment to traditional values like nuclear families, heterosexual unions, protection of the unborn or modesty, they're not tolerant at all.

They call opponents of the Ground Zero mosque bigots because the claim that the opponents ascribe "collective guilt" to all Muslims for 9/11, but they have no problem whatsoever blaming the whole of Catholicism when Catholic beliefs contradict their own view of the world.

For years, critics have tried to derail Schlessinger. Gay activists were successful in getting her short-lived TV program canceled by painting her as a homophobe. Feminists hate her because she has the gall to praise stay-at-home mothers and to tell young women that shacking up is low-rent. And they gleefully point to her own checkered past with her parent issues and the naked photos her boyfriend took and leaked to the Web.

So Schlessinger is not a saint. But she became a lightning rod for criticism because of her conservative views which, up until a few decades ago, were relatively mainstream. In the world of moral relativism, Schlessinger has been a constant. You can disagree with her viewpoint, but she's not the one who's changed (at least not since her youthful indiscretions).

I HOPE liberals are happy - they've managed to get a conservative standard-bearer off the air. The democratic voice of the people, powered by the threat of a boycott, has prevailed.

And I'm sure that means

they're rooting for California's Prop. 8 to be upheld on appeal, since that was another proud democratic roar. Right.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.

E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.