Cathy Renna, who worked at GLAAD and alongside StopDrLaura.com in 2000 to get Laura Schlessinger's TV show yanked, looks back on her time fighting the antigay "doctor."
COMMENTARY: This week, the notorious “Dr.” Laura said she is leaving her radio show after once again shooting her mouth off. But this time it was by using the n word and prompting a coalition of groups including Unity: Journalists of Color, the Women's Media Center, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to get her to apologize and retire from radio. For me, it was déjà vu all over again.
From 2000 through 2001, it sometimes seemed like I had more of a relationship with Dr. Laura than with my girlfriend. As the community relations director at GLAAD, I spent more time than I care to recall talking about Dr. Laura, working on GLAAD’s successful campaign to get her nationally syndicated TV show off the air, and traveling the country working with allied groups and meeting with the affiliate stations that had her show foisted upon them.
The differences between then and now have made me realize how much has changed — and how much hasn’t — in our community over the past decade. The short story is that we did not have the Internet as an organizing tool (especially Twitter), but the greater issue is that the media and our community have come very far in changing attitudes, lowering the tolerance for public defamation of all kinds. We see it happen every day, and it happens fast and furious. Back then we had to convince people she was a bigot; today, not so much.
A little history here. At the time, GLAAD was growing fast, having worked on much larger-scale national issues and being at the center of media influence is a way it had never been before, particularly around framing news issues and creating national debate about specific issues of defamation. Fresh off the controversial but highly visible campaign to combat Eminem’s hateful and violently homophobic lyrics, Laura Schlessinger’s comments about gay people being “biological errors” and many other offensive and inaccurate rants, GLAAD swung into action. We began a campaign that would last over a year, leading to the creation of an online activist organization focused on direct action and aggressive tactics, StopDrLaura.com, that pushed GLAAD to be more aggressive (more on that soon) and an investment by GLAAD in a campaign that was nuanced, very costly, and, in the end, so effective it garnered a PR Week award for nonprofit campaign of the year.
At the same time, many things have not changed. Dr. Laura called m a “brownshirt” on her show (and boy, did that piss off my family members who grew up under Mussolini in Italy). This time around, she is using the same name-calling tactic with Media Matters and spouting the same tired, inaccurate comments about her First Amendment rights being violated. I said it then — over and over on national television and in the community — and I say it now: There is no First Amendment right to have a nationally syndicated talk show. If there is, I would like my show now, please. MSNBC would be nice. I would be fine following Rachel Maddow.
But seriously, when it all started we had a very specific way of doing things at GLAAD — driven by the leadership — that included actually meeting with “Dr.” Laura (lucky Joan Garry, our executive director, did that and survived), difficult by necessary meetings with Paramount, and ramping up our grassroots efforts to reach out to as many as possible of the CBS (Paramount-owned) affiliates that would be airing the show as well as local community groups that wanted to work with us to get the show shut down before it could air.
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- Cathy Renna is a managing partner at Renna Communications, a public
interest communications firm that focuses on LGBT issues. She lives on
Shelter Island, N.Y., with her wife, Leah, and daughter, Rosemary.