Positions Dr. Laura Takes That Might Surprise Some

Both critics and supporters of Dr. Laura who think she's some religion-driven ultraconservative might be surprised if they listen to closely to her radio program. It helps to understand that she's coming from a position of what is best for children and makes a good society, not pushing a right-wing or Religious Right agenda.

Let's look at what might surprise some people.


Gay and Lesbian Relationships are Valid. If you've bought into the mean-spirited parodies and the activist agenda attacks, you may be shocked to find out that Dr. Laura treats these relationships as valid. She talks (often positively) about people in her life who are in these relationships, she helps callers in these relationships in a way that affirms their relationships as valid. On the other hand, she denies bisexuals are real, saying they're just hiding that they're gay or lesbian. To be fair, that's what some gay and lesbian people say, too.

Families Should Accept Their Openly Gay and Lesbian Members As Gays and Lesbians. If the above didn't surprise some religious conservatives who listen to her, this might.

Sex is OK Before Marriage. Granted, she doesn't come right out and say this, but she expects people to know if there is sexual compatibility before they marry. She rails against casual sex, to be sure, and supports people who want to tell potential sex partners "The next time I have sex it will be with my spouse." It appears that she expects people to be seriously heading for marriage (ring and a close date after a couple of years of dating) and to be prepared to immediately marry should a pregnancy result (and to use contraception when not actively trying to get pregnant). If someone isn't able to immediately provide a great married family life in which to raise the child, they should give a resulting child up for a closed adoption to a married man and woman. Hooking up, booty calls, sex within a few dates or a few months are all out. It's clear her moral standard is that people to be serious, long-term, and strictly monogamous in lifestyle and intentions before getting it on, especially when it comes to intercourse.

No Unmarried Cohabitation. You can hardly listen to one show of hers and miss this. People are mostly surprised she takes this position because it is so commonplace for people to live together "before marrying" or just to see if they could ever marry, or just to be together. She insists "shacking up" comes with no rules, no commitment (even if the lovers have made agreements); people who do it are "shack up honeys" and the women are "unpaid whores" (tellingly, no equivalent term applies to men). She might even hang up on people (especially men) who are shacking up without dealing with their question.

If You Have Minor Children, Do Not Divorce Unless There is Actual Abuse.  Like the above, if you listen at all you'll hear this, but people are surprised because they think they are justified in divorcing if they're not happy. A husband telling you that you're frustrating him or he feels neglected is NOT abuse. Telling you (truthfully) that you need to lose weight is NOT abuse. And even if you don't want to be married anymore, unless your spouse is molesting or beating someone or is a junkie or drunk, you should stay together and be polite, respectful, even affectionate, until the youngest child is 18 and done with high school. Whereas some religious conservatives and others see cheating as green light for divorce, Dr. Laura often recommends staying until the children are grown (see below).

Abuse Needs To Be Reported, But It's Not Abuse If Your Husband Hits You Back. Dr. Laura will buy very few forms of verbalizations as verbal abuse. If it isn't physical, it has a really high standard to reach before it can be considered abuse. Physical, especially sexual, abuse needs to be reported to create a paper trail and also to protect others. However, if a woman physically attacks her husband and he retaliates, unless the retaliation is significantly out of proportion, he's not the (sole) abuser.

Porn Isn't Harmful and Can Be Beneficial. This comes across when she talks with a wife who is upset about her husband viewing porn. As long as it isn't porn featuring gay male sex (or focusing on men), "children, or small farm animals", or kinks or fetishes, and as long as the husband isn't choosing to watch instead of having sex with his wife (or instead of tending to his other responsibilities), Dr. Laura defends a husband who watches, and might encourage the wife to join him. She especially defends husbands who are being sexually rejected by their wife. Porn addiction is a myth. She must get a lot of hate mail from certain feminists and religious conservatives over this one. Certain segments of religious conservatives insist porn is infidelity and will addict men and turn them into serial killers. Note that this applies to adults, especially adults in relationships. She says if a minor who has no actual sexual experience (she's against them having sex in the first place) is watching porn, it can be problematic. It's almost like it is something husbands have earned; the minor hasn't. But she says it's about how someone relates to sexual pleasure.

An Extra-Marital Affair Isn't The End of the World. Especially if it was a short fling the cheating spouse, who was neglected, voluntarily stopped, is remorseful about, didn't happen while the spouse was pregnant or battling cancer, didn't pass along an STD to the spouse, didn't produce a child, and was with an (one) "acceptable" person. "Acceptable" means someone who isn't significantly younger or someone in (or almost in) the family, such as an in-law or cousin or something. Some people are shocked when Dr. Laura smokes out the cheated-on spouse as having broken marital vows in other ways before the affair. Dr. Laura is far more likely to encourage someone to get past an affair if there are still minor children in the marriage. She also tells the cheater, if they ended the affair and haven't told their spouse about the affair, to carry the burden of the guilty secret to their grave, if possible.

Day Care is a Day Orphanage. As with cohabitation and divorce, daycare, which Dr. Laura points out is anything before K, is so common these days that people are shocked by her position that daycare is abandonment. This isn't a light preference. She rips into people who use daycare as if they should already know it is abandonment, and denies the masculinity of men who won't do whatever they can to ensure their child won't be in daycare.

More Than Ten Years of Age Difference Means the Man is Terrible. Whereas conservatives, including religious conservatives, have often supported older men marrying younger women (to a certain extent), and socially liberal people usually don't have strong opinions against it, Dr. Laura rails against it. Don't even bother with the woman being older. This applies to homosexual relationships as well. She rips into the older person. (Her late husband was more than ten years older than her, but her mindset has changed significantly since they married.)

No Babies After 40. Whereas many conservatives, especially religious ones, will encourage women to keep having children as long as they're able, and many feminists and career women hold off having children until they're older, Dr. Laura says it isn't fair to the child to have a mother who is over 40 when born. And since men aren't supposed to be much older than the woman, they're already included. And don't even think about conceiving children outside of a husband and wife situation.

Having Just One Child is Great. Dr. Laura is all for contraception. Dr. Laura clearly thinks five or more children is a terrible thing to do, with visions of Andrea Yates probably running through her head. While many conservatives and certain others panic about a falling "fertility rate", Dr. Laura strongly defends having just one child, insisting it is beneficial for children, and it is what she did.

Men Should Get No Say If They Get a Woman Who Isn't Their Wife Pregnant. This is primarily in reference to a woman or girl putting a child up for a closed adoption. Dr. Laura thinks it is terrible that the "sperm donor" would be able to stop that. Really, there are ways to deprive him of any say. But don't mistake what her position is: she is staunchly opposed to elective abortion.

Ancestry DNA Tests Are Bad. Those pop-commercial "ancestry" or "heritage" DNA tests advertised on television, radio, and online in which people send in their DNA and find out about relatives and their supposed ancestry are a BIG NO-NO. Dr. Laura is vehemently opposed to these. She even turned down having one such company as an advertiser. The reasons she gives for her opposition, some of which are demonstrated by calls to her show, include: it is irrelevant who your ancestors were, the people who raised you are your parents, your life is what you've made it, any genetic relative you don't already know about is a stranger and contacting (or being contacted by) them as "family" is disruptive and disrespectful. She bemoans that people find out that they have older siblings or half siblings their parent(s) put up for adoption, that their father had affairs while married to their mother or knocked up women before their mother, that they are the result of literal sperm donation, that they are the product of rape or an affair their mother had, or that the man who raised them and cared for them after their mother was knocked up by a bum isn't their biological father. She flatly dismisses claims of needing to know for "health reasons", saying that tests will reveal whatever we need to know about our health.

Family Cohesion is More Important Than Religious Conversion. Say, for example, a wife has rejected Mormonism as true (practices and theology) and/or the Mormon church as the true church. If she married as a Mormon and her husband and children are Mormon, Dr. Laura expects her to go through the motions for the sake of family cohesion. She can even say she's convinced Judaism, which Dr. Laura was affiliated with, is true. Dr. Laura will still tell her to keep the family cohesive until the children are grown. Many of her listeners believe that nothing is more important than publicly professing and practicing what they see as true religion or "being true to yourself", but Dr. Laura's goal is family cohesion until the children are raised. Replace "Mormon" with "Catholic" or "Jehovah's Witness" or various Protestant denominations, and her position remains consistent.

You May/Should Leave a Troubled Marriage if There are No Minor Children or the Children Are Grown. As Septuagenarian widow herself, Dr. Laura has been encouraging older wives to work things out because the likelihood of finding an acceptable new husband is slim. That's doesn't apply to abuse: she urges people to escape abuse. But if she's talking to someone younger, whether they are newlyweds or have been married decades, if they don't have any (surviving) minor children and they have significant problems in their marriage, Dr. Laura will tell them they're free to leave, even "You made a mistake; don't stay in the mistake." This seemingly sidesteps other situations in which she refers to sacred vows made in front of God and witnesses, and she's very skilled at helping people work things out to stay together, but there you go. This will often involve her asking "Between now and dead, is this how you want to live your life?" When minor children are involved, your wants aren't as important as the child's need for a stable, intact home. When there are no minor children in the home, you have a lot more freedom.

God Doesn't Intervene in Our Daily Life. At least not in the sense of causing things to happen a certain way. That's what our brains are for. She talks very much like a Deist. Granted, the whole point of her show is for people to take control over their lives instead of hoping for things to be made different. When people think they've gotten a message from God or that God has caused something to happen in their life, Dr. Laura usually directs them away from that or flat-out says she doesn't think God is spending His day doing things like that. Meanwhile, some of her listeners no doubt attribute things that happen every day in their life to Divine Providence.

She Embraces the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Or, at least, she is convinced in macroevolution as the origin of the biodiversity we have today. To be fair, many staunch conservatives, even some religious ones, do as well. But many of her listeners believe in some form of supernatural involvement in origins and biodiversity, and some are young-earth Creationists. (Notice that many religious conservatives can tolerate views different from their own just fine, and love/support/enjoy people who believe differently, contrary to negative stereotypes.)

It Is An Obligation to Avoid Destructive Family Members. There is no obligation to keep in contact with parents or siblings or children who were, or are, abusive. Rather, there is an obligation to protect your spouse and (other) children from them, and to not let yourself be abused or mistreated because you won't be as effective of a spouse or parent if you do. This is where people fall flat on their faces when they think they've got Dr. Laura pegged as hypocritical because her mother died and nobody discovered her body for quite a while.

Addiction/Substance Abuse Is Not a Disease. While it is very popular these days to call being a drunk or a junkie as "disease", Dr. Laura dismisses that talk and points to cancer as a disease. People stop being drunks and junkies when they decide to. People don't instantly rid themselves of cancer by deciding to stop having it. She also rejects claims of "sex addiction, "porn addiction", and  "food/eating addiction". However, she still recommends drunks and junkies and their family members go to Alcoholics Anonymous, Alanon, and similar organizations that use the "disease" language. She insists people can't have relationships with drunks or junkies because the person is clouded by the substance (even when they're not drunk or stoned).

Empty Nests and In-Laws. Dr. Laura usually insists that children leave the nest when they're 18 and done with high school, and that they not move back in (the exception is when they wind up with a child or children and without a good spouse, because the little children need the example and protection and nurturing of an intact family.) If your child has a disability or impairment, find a group home or something along those lines so they can move out when they're no longer minors. This is not only for the child's benefit but for your "privacy." Neither you nor your spouse should move in a sibling or parent. None of these people should be living on the same property or in the immediate neighborhood. This goes against the traditions of many cultures, in which children, especially females, were kept in the home until getting ready to marry and siblings and aging parents have been welcomed into the home or onto the property.

Your Child Doesn't Have to Go to College and Probably Shouldn't. Dr. Laura has a Ph.D (hence "Doctor") and has taught at a university. So clearly she has valued higher education. Also, it has become standard across economic classes to aspire or insist on college. However, not all children are cut out of college, at least not at 18. College is only necessary for certain lines of work, and unless your child is planning to go into one of those lines of work and seems to be suited and motivated for it, they should avoid the enormous expense, extremist social engineering, and extending of adolescence that have become part of most college experiences these days.

Don't Have a Personal Facebook Page. Dr. Laura has a page for her program, on which people are invited to comment and discuss program topics, but she doesn't have a personal Facebook profile and she strongly advises against having one or looking at personal Facebook pages, even going so far as to question the masculinity of men who have one. This might surprise people who find that it is a great tool for keeping in touch with extended families and helping families organize events and to communicate. She is vehemently opposed to putting pictures of your children on Facebook (or anywhere else online) or putting any adult's picture online without their permission. 

I might add to and enhance this list as I see worthwhile.