Dr. Laura: You thought I hated homosexuals? I meant I hate happy people!

That's about as intelligent of a response to the multiple campaigns against her as we get in this Radar interview. Seriously. While the kids at Gay Patriot caught it before me (I guess that's a hat tip) and just ate it up, beautiful people are a little more skeptical. GLAAD has a good list of her heterosexual supremacist comments up.

Quick summary of the Radar interview: she stands by her quotations about gays being inherently disordered, a biological error, but doesn't understand the huss-fuss; she's against same-sex couples adopting because they can't possibly be better than orphanages (Dr. Laura laughs in the face of facts); she insists on using the word "homosexual" instead of gay; and she is completely down with ex-gaying people. Yeah, so I can't see why people said anything.

But a couple of things jumped out at me. First, the editor notes that the interviewer "is not, in fact, gay. He is, however, gay friendly." I don't understand the first half because he keeps on referring to his male partner, but the second half just makes me mad. Some editor just sat down and decided that this guy was gay-friendly, objectively, and if anyone has a problem with him, well, they're being unreasonable, because if you remember from earlier in this sentence, the interviewer is gay-friendly! Especially when he goes into this strange hypothetical about adopting a child and says that someone will play the "mommy role" and if things don't work out with the surrogate mother they'll just abort, although it was hard to make heads or tails of it.

Anyway, the second thing was Dr. Laura trotting out the "I don't hate gays - some of my best friends are gay!" defense. In which case I think that the word "homophobia" has become obsolete in describing anti-gay hatred. It's an old idea that people who didn't like gay people were just woefully uninformed because they hadn't actually met a gay or lesbian, so they feared the unknown. That's not the case anymore. People like Rick Santorum, James Dobson, and Dr. Laura aren't uninformed.

This is why the term "heterosexual supremacy" should replace the term "homophobia". It describes how these people do know the gays and are willfully misinformed about us, all to support their gut feeling that heterosexuals are superior to non-heterosexuals. From Dr. Laura in 1998:

I contend [homosexuality]'s been twisted into a major interference with heterosexuality[....] if you're gay or a lesbian, it's a biological error that inhibits you from relating normally to the opposite sex. The fact that you are intelligent, creative and valuable is all true. The error is in your inability to relate sexually, intimately, in a loving way to a member of the opposite sex. It is a biological error.

In Dr. Laura's worldview, being gay is an error. She believes that God created every person and took his time to make everyone good, except of course the gays who were the ones He messed up on and was about to throw away but decided that Earth could use a little trash, those errors. That's not a fear of gay people; that's a complex structure of heterosexual supremacy.

So when she talks about gay friends and reads letters from gay people who are oh so glad that Dr. Laura directed them to NARTH, she's factually correct. She does like the gay people that she can control and feel superior to. Another old quotation, from 2000

Rupert Everett, that was it. He played -- he was so wonderful in "The Marriage," "The Perfect Marriage," I think it was. He was hilarious. That was a fabulous movie. "The Ideal Husband," whatever the heck it was.

After gushing over Everett when he played straight (so aggressively straight that the movie was titled after his character's heterosexuality), she goes on to say how much she hated his role in The Next Best Thing, where he played gay. She's OK with queers as long as they hide their sexuality and do a little song and dance for her, but for a gay man to play a gay character in a movie? They might get all uppity and think that they are equal!

That's heterosexual supremacism, and that's why the "I have gay friends" argument is irrelevent.

She did say this: "Hate generally eclipses good, because it has no boundaries." But she doesn't get any sympathy for pretending not to understand why gays and lesbians had a problem with her.